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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T05:31:37+00:00

I’ve setup my app to run on Heroku with a staging and production environment

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I’ve setup my app to run on Heroku with a staging and production environment as according to their documents. http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/multiple-environments

It seems pretty straightforward to manage with the staging app, push entire deployments or new branches up to test in staging. What I wonder is how to manage the production version.

How do I keep my production up and running when deploying new code? Do I pull in the changes from staging or do I redeploy the entire app with the changes merged in?

Secondly, how do I manage and keep my database intact during all of this? I’m used to running locally where if you do a new deploy and a new rake :db:migrate, you lose all your database data. How is this done in production to not lose your records?

Thanks you and ANY other tips regarding heroku management is welcome.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Typically, you make changes locally, including migrations or whatever. Before pushing your changes to your production app, push changes to your staging app to double-check things are okay.

    If you added migrations in your changes, be sure to run heroku run rake db:migrate to migrate your staging database. Running rake db:migrate should not destroy any data so long as your migration is proper – i.e. no weird tampering with data, just the standard addition/renaming/etc. of columns or introducing new tables. (Obviously if you drop a table in a migration it’ll be gone.)

    Then, if everything is okay with your staging app, push changes to your production, and again run heroku run rake db:migrate if you had any new migrations. If things are not okay, run heroku help to get a list of commands you can use – particularly ones with regard to releases so you can revert back to a previous release. Also heroku logs is really useful, and heroku console (actual command might be slightly different), though when you start a console, be really careful not to tamper with data too much.

    With Heroku, there’s no deploy command needed – right when you git push, your updated code is there. No “cap deploy” with capistrano, if you’ve used that before.

    Hope this helps.

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