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With the Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline, there’s the rake assets:precompile command which precompiles assets into public/assets along with a manifest.yml file which rails uses to put the paths to the assets in its templates. Precompiling generates a few files, which can clutter commit logs if they’re committed. For this reason I might add public/assets to my .gitignore and build them on the server, rather than committing them to git and uploading them. Or, if the server had trouble compiling them, I might precompile them locally, and scp them up rather than committing them to git, because they can make a lot of noise in my git logs.

On Heroku, though, git is the only way to deploy. So if I’m having trouble having heroku precompile them, I need to commit them and push them via git. This could clutter up my commit log.

There is a way around this, though: use a branch! If I create a branch just for heroku, and just commit them to the branch, I can keep my commit logs free of changes to public/assets.

Here is a sketch of this process:

  1. Add public/assets to my .gitignore and commit it
  2. Create a heroku branch with git checkout -b heroku
  3. remove public/assets from my .gitignore and commit it. This just affects my heroku branch.
  4. Run RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile there.
  5. Run git add . and git commit -m 'precompile assets' to commit the files to my heroku branch
  6. Run git push heroku heroku:master to push my heroku branch to heroku as master (heroku only uses the master branch)
  7. Run git checkout master and continue development on my master branch.

A deploy rake script could be used to automate this.

The heroku branch wouldn’t need to be pushed to github, because it doesn’t contain any information that can’t be regenerated. The only reason the history would need to be preserved is so it can be cleanly pushed to the heroku app. Fortunately, if the local repo was lost, it’s possible to pull from the heroku repository. Heroku shouldn’t be used as a place to store git repositories because the lifecycle for a heroku app is often different than that of a repository. For this purpose, though, the usefulness of the old assets commits is tied to the life of the Heroku app so it works out well.

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I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.

— Henry David Thoreau (seen in the lobby of Hotel Palomar in San Francisco last week)

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To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I’m developing a Rails site that uses MySQL and runs on Heroku. I’m using Xeround for the database, which has a free trial. Xeround is a database PaaS (Platform as a Service) that runs on several places, including Amazon Web Services in their U. S. East region, which is where Heroku runs. Running it in the same place where Heroku runs gives it a low latency.

To set up Xeround, sign up for an account and set up a database instance in the AWS U. S. East region. Go to the page for the database instance, and you will see the username and the database URLs.

Rails reads its database configuration from config/database.yml. Heroku overwrites config/database.yml with a file it generates from the DATABASE_URL configuration variable. The configuration variable uses the database driver name as the network scheme (e. g. mysql://). There is more than one mysql driver for Rails; the one suggested in the Rails Guide is mysql2.

To use mysql2 as the database driver with Xeround, use the following for the DATABASE_URL configuration variable:

heroku config:add DATABASE_URL='mysql2://{{username}}:{{password}}@{{hostname}}:{{port}}/{{dbname}}'

The username, hostname, and port number can be seen on the DB Instance Manager page on Xeround. The hostname and port are under one of the three DNS Names; I picked the top one. The password is what was entered for the database password during signup. The database name is the name of the database to be added using PHPMyAdmin.

The driver also needs to be included in the Gemfile. To include it just for production, use:

group :production do
  gem 'mysql2'
end

After adding this, run bundle install, commit your changes, and push to Heroku.

The database still needs to be created. To create the database, click on one of the links under DNS Names on the DB Instance Manager. This brings up PHPMyAdmin. Enter the database password and log in. Then create the database, with the same name used for the DATABASE_URL configuration variable.

Now that the database has been created, the DATABASE_URL is set, and the Gemfile is updated and pushed, you should be able to migrate the database by running heroku run rake db:migrate.

I’m using the latest version of Rails (3.1.1) on Heroku’s cedar stack.

It will be interesting to see how well Xeround works for this project. There are other MySQL hosting options for EC2 if I need them, and migrating is fairly simple.