So I was playing with Rails this weekend making all sorts of progress until I tried to get it running on Heroku. Everything worked fine locally but a variety of errors plagued me up on the servers.

I figured out 4 main issues i was having

• Bamboo stack instead of Cedar
• Rails 3.2 instead of 3.0
• Forcing a push to Github
• sqlite3 instead of pg

First off I had updated to the latest Rails version but it seems you need to jump through hoops on Heroku if you want to use the latest and greatest. I also looked at using 3.1 on Heroku but this also wasn’t out of the box. So I opted for the tried and true Rails 3.0 on Heroku/Cedar.

Bamboo stack instead of Cedar

When I setup my app this weekend I just used the default Heroku Create syntax. Many of the tutorials neglect to include the –stack option. So after I figured out I wanted to be on cedar instead of bamboo I created my application  on Heroku using:

$ heroku create --stack cedar

Rails 3.2 instead of 3.0

The only problem was I had updated my local rails version to 3.2 and now I need to roll back to version 3.0.

Well I didn’t need to, I could have used the gem _version_ convention. Specifically the Gem setup has a wrapper for executables like rake and rails. That executable supports a _version_ parameter to specify a particular version . I could have used: $ rails _3.0_ new myProject all the time, but that’s just more things for me to forget and I really just wanted a base setup.

The first thing I needed to do was get Rails 3.0 installed. For that I called:

$ gem install rails --version "3.0"

Once installed 3.2 was still being used so I uninstalled it:

$ gem uninstall rails

Since I had two copies installed at this point it asked me which to uninstall, I choose 3.2

Unfortunately my project was already setup using 3.2 so I had to get it clean up back to 3.0. I could have edited the Gemfile, but again I wanted a clean base setup. I trashed the project and rebuilt it with 3.0 scaffolding.

Forcing a push to Github

I added the remote github repo and tried to push but there were conflicts. I honestly  didn’t care at this point so I forced the push not typically advised but I was running out of patience:

$ git push -f origin master

sqlite3 instead of pg

All good so far now I could deploy

$ git push heroku master

but there were errors. DOH I forgot that they use postgress on Heroku not sqlite3. I wasn’t ready to install postgress locally so I opted for a split DB setup. Again this is not advised, I should be using the same DB locally and in prod. I just wanted to get this running though.

Time to update my Gemfile from

gem 'sqlite3'

To this:

group :development, :test do
 gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :require => 'sqlite3'
end
group :production do
 gem 'pg'
end

Once that’s saved I went back to a little tip about –without production and ran:

$ bundle install --without production

Then I continued with the deployment and ran

$ heroku run rake db:migrate

and everthing worked fine.

Now I can focus on writing the code and not worrying about the environment setup.