Heroku is a great project whose goal is to make Rail application development easy and painless. As we speak, the website is still in beta stage, but the creators are coming quickly to a paid model to be launched soon.

The project is the result of the collaboration of Adam Wiggins, James Lindenbaum, and Orion Henry. The three have made an incredible contribution to the Rails world by making it dead simple to deploy an application.

I signed up for a free account and got mine the next day. The control panel makes creating a project a snap, and you can quickly type in the details of your particular one. I had been working on my application for some time, so I had my source code handy. The only thing you need to do is tar the source code and import the zipped file into Heroku, like so:

Example: rm -rf myapp/{log,tmp}; tar czf myapp.tar.gz myapp/

That’s all.

Once you upload your code, Heroku does its thing, like change the database configuration file (they run on Postgres). After I was done uploading, a button called my attention and prompted me for running my migrations. I did, in the Ruby/Rails console provided, and a minute later I could test my application live.

The control panel gives you a tree view of your application structure, and you can use the on-line editor to make changes to the code. I have seen in the forums some people complain about the editor, but I think it’s great to make changes on the fly or if you happen to be away from your development box.

Since Heroku is still in beta stage, and the trio hasn’t yet worked on the payment methods, I can’t say how well the servers scale or perform. My application is destined to a small market, so I will never get close to even stressing the server. But I admit everything it’s pretty fast so far, specially given my lack of programming skills. I had a URL that I purchased through Yahoo! Small Business. I redirected the URL to Heroku’s own address and that worked wonders for me. Heroku is now giving sanctum quotas, which are faster bandwidth and more performance for people who need to go online now. I got mine pretty fast, but did not need to change CNAME by creating a sub-domain to use my own URL, which is the way Heroku prefers since it was easier to just redirect.

I hope the site continues to award free plans to those willing to test. The free quota is of 10 megabytes of space, and at the moment I don’t see a specific quota of bandwidth, but you don’t get always top performance (hey, it’s free!) I imagine for free development, in the near future there might be some limits, but I was very happy with the way the whole site performs so far.

I can’t stress again how easy it is to deploy. Just add DNS information and select from development to production status. That’s it! No need to worry about SVN, Capistrano, or other gems. Just tar the whole thing and upload it. So simple even I got it right!

Adam, James and Orion: thanks for the bottom of my heart. Free beer party if you are ever in Panama. You made a whole bunch of not so savvy Rails developer happy. But for what I see in the forums, there’s a whole bunch of very savvy developers using the project, so the impact might be even bigger than originally thought.

Check it Heroku and deploy the easy way!

written by Administrator