Question

This is a basic, stupid question, but I configured my Rails app to deploy on Heroku, and I’m able to open the application from my Heroku account, etc. But when I want to change my code, do I need to re-deploy the whole application? I tried just committing/pushing to heroku master, but I get the error “fatal: remote end hung up unexpectedly.” What should I do instead?

Also: am I supposed to run db:migrate BEFORE deploying/pushing?

Answer 1

There is nothing stupid about a basic question, as everyone has to start somewhere.

The basic process with deploying a Rails app to Heroku is to:

1. Make changes
2. Add and Commit your changes ($ git add files_changed.rb & $ git commit -m "make changes")
3. Push your changes to Heroku ($ git push heroku master)

This then pushes your code to the remote Heroku repository and redeploys your Rails application. If you have made any database migrations, you need to run:

$ heroku run rake db:migrate

This runs db:migrate on your heroku app – see how that works? 🙂

Running rake db:migrate locally simply migrates your local development database.