Prompted by Ruby Rogues episode 403 (Overcast link) I finally deployed my very unfinished Parkrun tracking app to Heroku today.

The premise of the episode is that Rails needs an “Active Deployment” gem built in to ease deployment of new apps to a variety of different services.

Our apps at work run an AWS EC2. To spin up a new one we currently need to create a new VM in AWS, somehow bootstrap the SSH certificates for ansible, run ansible to turn it into a Rails server and then run capistrano to deploy the application. It’s all documented in Confluence but I wouldn’t even know where to begin to try and create a similar set up for my own app(s).

The Heroku process was quite painless, their documentation is very thorough, but there were still a few sharp edges.

One thing that tripped me up for a while was getting Bundler versions in sync. I wrote up what I did on StackOverflow but I’ll cross post a lightly edited version on here for posterity.