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 defaults for dyno formation, third-party services, buildpack configuration, etc.

What's Included?

Required Add-Ons

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

• Heroku Postgres
• Heroku Redis to support Sidekiq and Action Cable.
• Memcachier to support Rails Cache.
• HDrive to support off-server file uploads backed by AWS S3.
• 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 and Sentry, both free, for redundant 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. Enabling Runtime Dyno Metadata

We include Honeybadger and Sentry (both at a free tier) for redundant error tracking by default. Sentry requires the following Heroku labs feature to be enabled:

heroku labs:enable runtime-dyno-metadata

3. 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

4. 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.