Ramaze, GitHub, and Heroku

I first heard of Heroku from, I believe, a rant by Zed (if you're offended by profanity, this is probably not for you). It looked pretty interesting and so I decided to give it a try. This was actually a bit more involved than I thought, not hard, but for the first time you have more than a few steps to get through. What I'm going to show is how to a) get Git running, set up GitHub, create the Ramaze application, load it to GitHub, and finally load it to Heroku. Strictly speaking, you don't need GitHub to get the app running on Heroku, but I'm going to start putting some of my posts up there and so I thought I might as well show it too.

Let's start with getting git up and running. On my Ubuntu system, simply type sudo apt-get install git-core. After that type git --version (my shows git version 1.7.2.1) to make sure everything installed correctly.

Next, let's set up a GitHub account. Go to http://github.com/plans and create yourself a free account (or move up to a paid account if you want). Next, you're going to need to generate a SSH key which will be used by both GitHub and Heroku. You can go to http://help.github.com/linux-key-setup/ if you're running Linux or http://help.github.com/windows-key-setup/ if you're on Windows (probably similar for you Mac users). Follow the directions and you should now have access to your GitHub account. Here's the command on Linux ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "yourusername@youremailprovider.com" to create the keys.

Now you'll want to configure git with a few your user name and email. The commands for this are:

Configure git with user and email
git config --global user.name "yourusername"
git config --global user.email "yourusername@youremailprovider.com"


We're going to put our code up on GitHub first, so let's create an application first. Let's just use the default ramaze application and upload that (not exactly what I've done, but close enough). First go to your Dashboard on GitHub and create a new repository and call it "foo". This is where the application will live on GitHub. Now, run ramaze create foo to create an application called foo in the current directory. Then cd foo and we'll get the application ready to upload. We do need to add one file for Heroku and that's a .gems file. This file will contain a list of all the gems used by your application. In this case, the file should have the single line ramaze. If you're using Sequel say, the file would also contain a line sequel. In general it should have a line for each gem and the gem name should be what you would do by a sudo gem install xxx. Here we're going to run some git commands. I'm just learning git myself, but here's a book that should help you get started. The maintainer of this book, Scott Chacon, also has a dead tree book called "Pro Git" that is also quite good. So assuming we're in the foo directory already, type git init. This will get the application ready for git. Next we need to add the files with a git add . to add all the files in this directory and all of it's subdirectories into the repository. Now we need to do a "commit" of the files with a git commit -m 'first commit for foo'. Next, we'll tell git where we're going to save this with a git remote add origin git@github.com:slabounty/foo.git and finally, we'll push it to GitHub with git push origin master. You should now be able to go to your GitHub dashboard, see this repository and look at the files in there. Also, since this is a "public" repository, others will also be able to view and download these files, so don't use this for proprietary code unless you're using a non-free plan.

OK, let's move on to getting this up and running on Heroku. Start by creating an account on Heroku at http://heroku.com/. Once you have an account, you can sudo gem install heroku to get the Heroku gem. Next we'll do a heroku keys:add (this uses the same keys we created above to allow us to upload our files to Heroku. The one thing to make sure of is that you've created the .gems file as described above. Start with these two commands

git remote add origin git@github.com:slabounty/SimpleHeroku.git
git push origin master


Next we'll create an application on Heroku (we don't need to go to the website to do it, we'll just use the gem) with heroku create (creates an application on Heroku and let's you know where it's at. In my case it was http://smooth-stone-75.heroku.com) and finally we push it up to Heroku with a git push heroku master.

You can then point your browser where ever the application was created at, for example the web site above and you should see it running there. What is there is not the base Ramaze application that would be created but another simple one that I did. You should be able to see the code on GitHub.

There quite a bit of information here and if any of it is unclear, let me know.