Deploying to Heroku

When you're ready to deploy to Heroku, it's highly recommended you use this button:

This button leverages the configuration found in app.json, including sensible demo-ready defaults for dyno formation, third-party services, buildpack configuration, etc.

The resources provisioned will cost about $22/month.

Please note: The resources provisioned via app.json are intended to be used for quickly launching your brand new app so that you can demo it easily. When you're ready to go into production you'll want to make some changes to these resources. See the section at the bottom of this page.

What's Included?

Required Add-Ons

We've included the "entry-level" service tier across the board for:

• Heroku Postgres
• Heroku Redis to support Sidekiq and Action Cable.
• Memcachier to support Rails Cache.
• Cloudinary to support off-server image uploads and ImageMagick processing.
• Heroku Scheduler for cron jobs.
• Rails Autoscale for best-of-breed reactive performance monitoring.
• Honeybadger for error tracking.
• Expedited Security's Real Email to reduce accounts created with fake and unreachable emails, which will subsequently hurt your email deliverability.

Additional Required Steps

Even after using the above button, there are a few steps that need to be performed manually using the Heroku CLI:

1. Add Heroku as a Remote in Your Local Repository

heroku git:remote -a YOUR_HEROKU_APP_NAME

After this, you'll be able to deploy updates to your app like so:

git push heroku main

2. Improve Boot Time

You can cut your application boot time in half by enabling the following Heroku Labs feature. See this blog post for more details.

heroku labs:enable build-in-app-dir

3. Adding Your Actual Domain

The most common use case for Bullet Train applications is to be hosted at some appropriate subdomain (e.g. app.YOURDOMAIN.COM) while a marketing site is hosted with a completely different service at the apex domain (e.g. just YOURDOMAIN.COM) or www.YOURDOMAIN.COM. To accomplish this, do the following in your shell:

heroku domains:add app.YOURDOMAIN.COM

The output for this command will say something like:

Configure your app's DNS provider to point to the DNS Target SOMETHING-SOMETHING-XXX.herokudns.com.

On most DNS providers this means going into the DNS records for YOURDOMAIN.COM and adding a CNAME record for the app subdomain with a value of SOMETHING-SOMETHING-XXX.herokudns.com (except using the actual value provided by the Heroku CLI) and whatever TTL refresh rate you desire. I always set this as low as possible at first to make it easier to fix any mistakes I've made.

After you've added that record, you need to update the following environment settings on the Heroku app:

heroku config:set BASE_URL=https://app.YOURDOMAIN.COM
heroku config:set MARKETING_SITE_URL=https://YOURDOMAIN.COM

You'll also need to enable Heroku's Automated Certificate Management to have them handle provisioning and renewing your Let's Encrypt SSL certificates:

heroku certs:auto:enable
heroku certs:auto

You should be done now and your app should be available at https://app.YOURDOMAIN.COM/account and any hits to https://app.YOURDOMAIN.COM (e.g. when users sign out, etc.) will be redirected to your marketing site.

4. Configure CORS on Your S3 Bucket

Before you can upload to your freshly provisioned S3 bucket, you need to run (on Heroku) a rake task we've created for you to set the appropriate CORS settings.

heroku run rake aws:set_cors

Note: If you change ENV["BASE_URL"], you need to re-run this task.

Getting ready for production

When you're ready to launch your app in production you probably don't want to use the entry-level resources that we provision via app.json

1. Use standard dynos instead of basic

To update your web and worker processes to use standard-1 dynos instead of basic:

heroku ps:type web=standard-1x
heroku ps:type worker=standard-1x

2. Upgrade your database

Pick the plan that matches the features you need: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql

Then follow the instructions here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/updating-heroku-postgres-databases

3. Upgrade your redis instance

Pick the plan that matches the features you need: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis

Then follow the instructions here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-redis-version-upgrade

4. Upgrade any other resources

Use heroku addons to see which addons you currently have installed. Double check the features that are included with your current plan and make sure they're sufficient for your needs in production.