Question

How do i get the changes from live to my repo? The files running on the heroku app have changed and now if i push these will be overwritten.

I have my php code running on heroku and storing ‘database’ things in local files.

        {
        "id":1,
        "date":"12/1/2012",
        "topImg":"/img/dates/1.jpg"
        .....

So these things are stored in a json object then just saved over.

Answer 1

Don’t do this!

Local files are your enemy, because Heroku is a cloud application host that runs applications on multiple anonymous load-balanced nodes.

Perhaps you’re running a single dyno right now for development purposes, but if you ever want to make your site go live you’ll need at least two dynos (because Heroku free tier service is qualitatively different from their non-free tier service, particularly in that they will spin down a free dyno if it is not being used but they will never do that to a non-free dyno). When you have multiple dynos, using local files for anything other than caching will be totally unmanageable.

Even if you somehow stay with one dyno forever, Heroku dynos are not guaranteed to maintain their local storage — if for instance there is a hardware failure on the machine your dyno is served from, Heroku will not hesitate to spin down your application, deleting all local storage, and spin it up again with just your application code loaded, because it does not expect your application to be using local storage for anything.

There is no one supported method for getting files off of a dyno, because, again, it’s never a good idea to store local files on a dyno. However, if you really, really need to do this, you can use heroku run and run one-off commands to, for instance, open up a shell and upload the files somewhere. Again: do not do this for anything serious, because once you have multiple dynos it’ll be nearly impossible to manage files on them.