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Adam Wiggins

Heroku Staff

API and External Git Access

Heroku now has an API (accessible from the command line, a Ruby library, or REST calls), revision control on all apps with Git, and remote access to the Git repository. The combination of these new features means that you can now work on your apps using the local tools you love – like TextMate, vi, or emacs – and still get the benefit of zero-configuration deployment to Heroku. How does it work? Grab the Heroku gem with “gem install heroku”. A sample work session looks like this: heroku clone myapp cd myapp ruby script/server …edit locally… git add . git…

Heroku Mailing List

Heroku now has a mailing list on Google Groups. Stop by and introduce yourself, but first read the welcome post.

We’re Huge in Japan

Last night we noticed a flood of .jp email addresses appearing on the waiting list – several hundred over the course of just a few hours. Turns out someone posted a comprehensive and flattering review of Heroku in Japanese (translation). I just couldn’t resist using the opportunity to post this image: Actually, it’s not just Japan: the international response to Heroku has astonished us. Denmark, New Zealand, France, Russia, Brazil – over half of our users are from outside the US. We chalk this up more to the universal appeal of Ruby and Rails than anything we’ve done, but either way…

Easy Authentication

Backstory: A Fiery Debate Writing a user model and the standard login authentication code seems like busywork to a lot of coders. In fact, many people expected a next-generation app framework such as Rails to handle this for you. After all, Django does. Initially the login engine for Rails seemed to fill this slot, but following a fair amount of controversy over best practices, the login engine was killed by its creator. With our BDfL having forever cursed prebuilt login systems, the Rails community mostly stopped trying to make them. Yet, this puts us back at square one: developers are…

Rails Hosting: Easy as Pie

Yesterday, DHH said: “I’d love for Rails to be easy as pie to run in a shared hosting environment, though. I’d love for Rails to be easy as pie to run in any environment. In that ‘more people could have fun learning Rails and deploying their first hobby application’ kind of way.” We humbly suggest that Heroku is one possible solution to the latter part of statement. Our vision for the long term is much grander than just a learning/hobby tool; but our beta product, as it stands today, can already fill this need quite nicely.

Heroku Loves RSpec

RSpec 1.1 is now a part of the default plugin kit for Heroku apps. We’ve been fans of RSpec for a while now, and feel that it represents the future of TDD/BDD for the Rails world. If you’re not familiar with RSpec, read up and then give it a try. You don’t need to install anything to use RSpec in your Heroku app, but you do need to initialize the spec/ and stories/ directories by running the rspec generator. Just open the Generate dialog, type in rspec, and click Run. Once you’ve written some specs, you can run them the…

Goodbye Rails 1.2

Rails 1.2 is now officially deprecated for Heroku apps. Starting January 3 (that’s tomorrow), new features we are developing will not be available on apps still configured to use Rails 1.2. Then, on January 21, we will automatically upgrade any remaining 1.2 apps. We know it’s only been a month since Rails 2 came out, so we hope this doesn’t come across as overly harsh. By taking this approach we can spend less time backporting, which means more time for new features. Since Heroku is still in early beta we feel that this is reasonable. Rest assured that when the…

View-Only Users

There are now two access levels for collaborators on Heroku apps: Full edit access, which allows access to everything: editing code, importing or exporting the database, changing the settings, etc. View-only access, which allows the user to view the app only. That is, they can visit the app url (myapp.heroku.com) but not any of the settings pages or the edit url (edit.myapp.heroku.com). For example, a client who wants to use the app but neither needs nor wants access to the code could be set as a view-only user. If your app sharing is set to public, the view-only access level…

Gems & Plugins Manager

Behold: the Heroku gems/plugins manager. This has been one of our most requested features to date, and we’re glad to finally get this released. Although you could manually upload plugins previously, this will make the process a lot smoother. (You can still manually manipulate the files in your vendor directory if you prefer.) To get to the manager, open your vendor directory in the lefthand filenav, and click the link that appears at the top: You can search by name, or browse the list of 2500+ gems and 1000+ plugins. Once you find what you’re looking for, click on Install…

Rails 2

Rails 2 is now the default for all newly created Heroku apps. Existing apps will continue to run on 1.2 unless you edit config/environment.rb and change the version number manually. Importing an app will try to guess the Rails version from your environment.rb, but you should double-check after the import to make sure the version is set to what you wanted. We’ll leave a 1.2 gem available for a while, but we’re going to take advantage of our beta status here and keep the time window on this relatively short – perhaps a month or two. (Don’t worry, by the…

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