Heroku Blog

Heroku Fork has been deprecated. See the GitHub repo for the Fork CLI plugin for details.

An application is more than source code – it’s executables, generated assets, runtime environments, dependencies, configuration, running processes, backing services and more. What if you could fork your entire app, not just your code?

heroku fork lets you create unique, running instances of existing applications right from the command line. These instances are live and available on Heroku immediately so you can change, scale and share them however you want.

How It Works…

Earlier this month, we quietly rolled out a new design for our monthly invoices. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the previous iteration, and we thought it would be interesting to share what goes into a design like this.

At Heroku, billing is complex. Dyno hours are calculated to the second. Add-ons are calculated based on each provider’s pricing plan, which can be monthly or by usage depending on the add-on. There are support expenses, credits, free dyno hours, and packages. This all has to be wrangled into a format that not only makes sense for…

When talking to Heroku users, a question that frequently comes up is "when do my apps go to sleep, and why?". Though the behavior is documented in Dev Center , we'd like to provide more immediate visibility into the state of your apps at any given moment.

When Do Apps Sleep?

When an app on Heroku has only one web dyno and that dyno doesn't receive any traffic in 1 hour, the dyno goes to sleep.

When someone accesses the app, the dyno manager will automatically wake up the web dyno to run the…

Heroku provides an opinionated platform in order to help you build better applications. We give you a default version of Ruby to get you started, and give you a way to declare your version for total control. In the past creating an application would give you 1.9.2, starting today the default is 2.0.0.

Ruby 2.0.0 is fast, stable, and works out of the box with Rails 4. Applications running on 2.0.0 will have a longer shelf life than 1.9.3, giving you greater erosion resistance .

Default Behavior

If you have a previously deployed app…

Change is a constant. At Heroku, we often deliver important information to users about changes and events on the platform, their apps and their accounts. We use a variety of media to keep users informed about these changes, including email, Twitter , the changelog and the blog .

To help provide more direct and relevant information, we've added a new feature to Dashboard called Notification Center. We'll be using the Notification Center to keep you informed of important events affecting you and your apps. When new notifications arrive, you'll see a badge in Dashboard's header.

If you…

Until now, Heroku Status has been focused primarily on present platform health – providing current status, uptime for the current month, and recent incident history. Today we're announcing an addition to our status site: a dedicated page to view historical uptime . The new uptime page provides a longer-term perspective on Heroku uptime and incidents – perspective that is critical for transparency and continued trust in the Heroku platform.

The new uptime page covers both the US and Europe regions for visibility into uptime where your apps are hosted. This was a top-requested feature with the recent launch…