How to deploy social stream to heroku

Heroku is a powerful cloud specifically design to deploy your rails apps and make them public, scalable and highly available.

In this short how-to we are going to show you how you can start testing a node of social stream deploying it to heroku.

Let's get started!

---

1.) Requirements

For obvious reasons you are going to need a heroku account. Visit http://heroku.com

---

2.) Installing social stream (the classic way)

Now that you have accounts in github and heroku you are ready to start.

Create a new rails application:

rails new myawesomesocialstream

Look for your Gemfile and add this line:

gem 'social_stream'

N.B. You cannot use sqlite3 on Heroku

Add this to your Gemfile,

group :production do
  gem 'pg'
end
group :development, :test do
  gem 'sqlite3'
end

Now run:

bundle update

rails generate social_stream:install

rake db:migrate

Your app is now ready to be executed locally with:

rails server

But this time we are aiming higher, to the cloud!

---

Warning

Make sure to set this in your config/application.rb before proceeding:

config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false

And run:

rake assets:precompile

It is required since the introduction of the new Assets pipeline in Rails 3.1+ for Heroku's Cedar stack.

3.) Git

Git and heroku are highly related, in fact you will push a local git repository to heroku:

Enter your project folder:

cd myawesomesocialstream

and execute: (of course you are going to need git sudo apt-get install git or http://git-scm.com)

git init

git add .

git commit -m "social stream ready to go"

Before the next step you need to make sure that you have an SSH public key ready in take a look at: in windows: http://help.github.com/msysgit-key-setup/ mac: http://help.github.com/mac-key-setup/ or linux: http://help.github.com/linux-key-setup/

---

4.) Heroku

We are almost there, install the heroku gem:

sudo gem install heroku

Inside your app folder execute:

heroku create --stack cedar

The first time you create an app you will be asked your heroku username & password.

Finally execute:

git push heroku master

heroku run rake db:migrate

And you're done!!

If everything went as expected you can now login to your heroku account -> My apps and see something like this:

---

5.) Post installation tips

After installing, remember to setup your default URL option at config/environments/production.rb:

config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => 'myapp.herokuapp.com'}

Otherwise some views will report a 500 error.

---

Check out the result at: http://demo-social-stream.herokuapp.com/