heroku.com is a new way of hosting rails apps that takes away lots of the pain. I got a tracks installation up and running there, so I thought I’d pass on some info about what I did. It’s from memory, but I’ll try and cover the main points.
1) Register for heroku and get familiar with it. Take a look at the site and learn about the way it integrates so nicely with git. To use Heroku it helps to be familiar with rails and git, but it’s still easier than most rails deployments. You’ll have to install the heroku gem using “[sudo] gem install heroku”
2) checkout Tracks from github. I checked out the master branch a couple of days ago, and it seems to work fine for me.
3) Customise Tracks for heroku.
a) This is the key bit. Heroku runs your app on a read-only file system, so bundle-fu can’t write to the local directory like it wants. I worked around this by commenting out the <bundle do> and <end> lines in app/views/layouts/standard.html.erb. Unless you do this you’ll get errors as soon as you view a page.
b) Copy config/site.yml.tmpl to config/site.yml, customise it as required, and check it in to git. This is important because we need git to upload it to heroku, so it needs to be checked in. You might have to remove the site.yml line from .gitignore to achieve this. There’s no need to customise database.yml, heroku will do this automatically on the server.
c) In the tracks directory, type “heroku create”. This will return a URL and remote git URI, as well as configuring a remote in git called heroku
4) Upload. Type “git push heroku master”. Heroku will compile tracks server side, and hopefully print a success message
5) type “heroku open” and your new site should appear.
6) Optional - add a CNAME record to a personal domain and get heroku to recognise it. See http://docs.heroku.com/custom-domains
This is from memory, and now I’ve written it down it looks more complicated than I intended, but I wanted to recommend Heroku, and give some tips on how to host Tracks there.
Hope it helps,
Gavin.
