Heroku Collaborators Quickstart Guide

Heroku is a new approach to deploying web applications. Forget about servers; the fundamental unit is the app. Develop locally on your machine just like you always do. When you’re ready to deploy, use the Heroku client gem to create your application in our cloud, then deploy with a single git push. Git allows you to have multiple source repositories all at the same time. By making Heroku just another source repository, you can push your code and deploy your application in one easy step.

Heroku makes it easy to collaborate with others. Collaborating allows you to share access to your source code, make any changes and push a new version of the application up quickly and easily.

You can start sharing existing applications with a single command.

New collaborators can get started by following these instructions:

Prerequisites

Before using Heroku there are three requirements:

  1. Your local machine must be setup to run ruby applications: Getting Started with Rails, Developing Rails apps on Mac OS X

  2. Install Git: On a Mac, Windows, or UNIX/Linux

  3. Install the Heroku gem

Collaborating on an app

Clone the code

The first step is to clone the git repo to your local machine. The invitation email included the name of the app. First ensure that your keys are already on Heroku. If this is the first time you have ever used heroku, run:

$ heroku keys:add

To clone the git repo, simply run this command, filling in the appropriate app name:

$ git clone git@heroku.com:APPNAME.git -o production

This will create a directory called APPNAME, with a full copy of the git repository. It also sets up a git remote called “production”. If you'd prefer to name this something else (e.g. heroku, or staging), simply change the parameter after the -o flag.

Edit and Deploy

You can now make any changes. When you are ready to deploy these changes, simply commit and push your changes:

$ git commit -a -m "log of the changes I made"
$ git push production master
-----> Heroku receiving push
-----> Launching.... done