Ballpark It on Heroku

Lately I’ve been hearing more and more about Heroku. Originally it seemed that the “easy deployment” was coupled with writing code in the browser using their online editor, which wasn’t too appealing to me. But things have changed since then. Now they’ve implemented a Git workflow for deployments. And with a free option, it was time to revisit it.

Since I had that little project estimate app lying around on GitHub, I thought I’d use that as the guinea pig. Here’s literally what I did:

1. sudo gem install heroku – get the heroku gem
2. cd ~/sites/ballparkit && git pull – navigate to my app and make sure it’s up to date
3. heroku create – set the app up on my heroku account
4. git push heroku master – deploy it
5. heroku rake db:migrate – load the DB
6. heroku rename ballparkit – rename the application (also gives it the ballparkit subdomain)
7. .gems – add a .gem manifest to manage app-specific gems

And seriously, that’s it. It took me less than 30 seconds to deploy it. And heroku console works as expected, too. You can now find the app live at http://ballparkit.heroku.com.

Oh, and future deployments are as easy as: git push heroku. It’s ridiculous.

It truly is amazing how simple and smart Heroku is. If you have an app that needs deployed and about 2 minutes of your time, it’s seriously worth trying it out. I’m certainly convinced.