Question

My rails app allows users to edit a certain json file through the browser. This data file is saved in app/assets/data/thefile.json (the site is only used internally)

I tested the front-end locally and it worked fine, the data gets updated and saved. Then I pushed the code to Heroku and tested it there as well. It worked. However after about 1 day when I go back to the site, I realized that the data has reverted to its original state before it was edited.

This happened numerous times and I’m not so sure why it happened. Maybe because Heroku does not allow files in the app folder to be edited?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Probably has something to do with the fact that Heroku has a read only file system.

There’s also a note here on the ephemeral file system

Each dyno gets its own ephemeral filesystem, with a fresh copy of the
most recently deployed code. During the dyno’s lifetime its running
processes can use the filesystem as a temporary scratchpad, but no
files that are written are visible to processes in any other dyno and
any files written will be discarded the moment the dyno is stopped or restarted.