Rails #1b: Heroku

If you though getting started with Rails seemed easy from my first post, you haven’t tried out Heroku yet. Heroku is a hosted solution for Rails that comes with a browser based IDE. There’s nothing to install. It is so easy that it’s almost ridiculous. To me, this is the future of application hosting.

One of the remarkable things about Rails is that it lets you get up and running very quickly. Here is what you need to do to get your first application up and running on Heroku.

  1. Apply for an account on heroku (or mail me for an invitation)
  2. When you have gotten your account set up, go to the heroku page for your applications and log in.
  3. Press the big button labeled “Create New App”
  4. Click the button that look like a gear in the lower left hand corner and choose “generate” from the pop-up menu.
  5. Enter scaffold article title:string author:string content:text and click “run”
  6. Press the yellow text labeled “Migrate now” to create the articles table in the database
  7. (Optional) Select “rake” from the gear pop-up menu and type test
  8. (Optional) In the “rake” window, type db:fixtures:load to populate the database with test data
  9. Press the button with two right arrows ("»") on the top right corner and you will be taken to your application, done being installed on the heroku server. Add /articles to the url to see your newly generated application
  10. You can now play around with creating, retrieving, updating and deleting articles
  11. Click the button with two left arrows ("< <") on the bottom of the screen to return to the IDE
  12. (Optional) Make the application publicly available. Click the name of the application (“unnamed-xxxx” on the top left corner). Pick a name for your application, select “Public” to have it deployed to the net, and press rename

You now have a fully working, running, deployed Rails application. It requires no installation on your part. From here, you can follow the rest of my articles on Rails pretty much straightforward. Welcome aboard.

Comments:

Johannes Brodwall - Feb 26, 2008

Hi Suezanne.

Yes, you’re right. I’ve corrected the article. Thanks for the catch.

Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen - Feb 24, 2008

Just a tiny beware on outsourcing to EC2 in case you need more than 4 nines of uptime on your rails app.

SuezanneC Baskerville - Feb 26, 2008

At the end of step five it says “Generate”. Should that be “Run”?

  1. Enter scaffold article title:string author:string content:text and click “generate”

Tom - Jan 13, 2009

Thanks for this great tutorial mate

jhannes - Nov 16, 2008

Hi, Eve

Thanks for the offer. Let me know if there’s any way I can make it easier. Do you think I should consolidate all the articles into one, for example?

MikeCrabe - Jan 6, 2009

I think it would be great if you could write one.

eve isk - Nov 16, 2008

I’d be more than happy to read drafts, run through example code, and whatnot. I’ve done a little bit of Rails work, but I’m enough of a noob that I’ll be able to give good feedback on the clarity of the guide from the perspective of someone who has no real idea what he’s doing.

[HIPS] - Mar 7, 2009

By far, Heroku is the most amazing web app I have used in the past year [maybe ever!] and I look forward to new developments.

If there is anything I can do to help [other than continuing to spread the word], please let me know.