Question

I have a Rails app deployed on Heroku and I have a git repo that I’m currently working on with uncommitted code changes. In the meantime, I need to make changes to the source on Heroku independently of the local repo. Can I do the following:

1. Clone the Heroku git repo on the same development machine with a different app name though with the same account
2. Make changes to the new local repo
3. Commit those changes to the new local repo
4. Push those changes to the Heroku repo
5. Resume working on my original local repo

Will this approach work?

Answer 1

Yep, that workflow would work, or stash them – and don’t forget if you do make a clone of the heroku repo you’ll have made changes to a different clone of the repo and you’ll need to make those changes in your original local repo.

In future I’d suggest that you assume that your ‘master’ branch is what’s live on Heroku and branch of that to work in – you can even push this branch into a new app for testing purposes. This way bug fixes can be performed on your local master branch (or another branch and merged into master) and pushed to heroku and then when you’ve finished your new work you merge the branch back into master and deploy that to your live environment. I wrote a blog article on the subject a while back, here