Deploying a Ruby on Rails application to the heroku cloud

Preconditions:

• Git Repository
• Setup Git version control for Ruby on Rails project

1. Step: Sign up for heroku

The very first step is to sign up for an heroku account. Heroku provides on free web instance which should be enough for most production needs.

Signing up can be done here: https://api.heroku.com/signup/devcenter

Step 2: Install the Heroku Toolbelt

The next step is to install the heroku toolbelt. It provides a lot of different command line commands which can be used to interact with heroku including:

• Deploying a application to heroku
• Configuring custom domains
• Configuring database backups
• Starting instances

The toolbelt can be downloaded here: https://toolbelt.heroku.com/

Step 3: First login

The next step is to do a first login using the heroku login command on the command line. If no ssl key was provided it is possible to create one now.

Step 4: Create the app on Heroku

The next step is to create an application on heroku. This application already includes one free web instance.
The task can be accomplished by running the toolbelt command heroku create on the commant line.

Step 5: Deploy
The last step is to actually deploy the application which can be done by running the command git push heroku master.