Question

I’m using heroku to develop a Django app and they use git to push the code. My problem is that they need this file structure:

heroku_project/
     requirements.txt (this a pip requirements file)
     procfile (this file tell heroku how to run your app)
     django_project (the project itself)
     lib
     bin
     build
     lib (these 4 folders belong to my python virtual env)

So i have to have my git initialised on this folder so this means that there are this additional files:

heroku_Project/
     .gitignore
     .git

According to their instructions inside .gitignore there should be these lines:

bin
build
include
lib
.Python
*.pyc

The problem is that I want to track those virtual env folders, because sometimes I install python only for testing and I discard them later, or I make experimental changes on them and I wish I could undo those changes using git, my question is how can i track these folders so I need to remove them from the .gitignore. The problem is when i do

git push heroku master

As this will push those folders and we don’t want that, so how I can selectively push files and directories? Or what kind of work flow would you use to solve this problem?

Thanks

Answer 1

First, if you’re doing active development in Heroku then you may be dead in the water. But if your doing development on your local machine – branches may be able to help you out.

My advice to you would be to create a separate branch for deploying code to heroku. In this scenario you could use the master branch for active development, and keep those virtual environment folders in there – and have a separate branch (say, “production”) for deploying the code to heroku.

Whenever you’re ready to release a new version of your code, you should switch over to the production branch, merge in the changes from master, delete those virtual environment folders, then push to Heroku. In practice, that command sequence will look something like this.

$ git checkout production
$ git merge master
$ rm -Rf bin build include lib .Python *.pyc
$ git commit -a -m "Cleanup for production."
$ git push heroku production

That seems as though it will be the best working solution. Some vectors you may want to look into on your own:

• Ways to automate the process of deleting the files via shell scripts and git hooks.
• To make sure that Heroku can use a branch other than “master” for running code (I would think that it should be able to).
• To see if it may be possible to use different .gitignore files in different branches, and if so – whether or not that will remove the cleanup process of deleting those files manually.

Hope this helps!