Installing on Heroku

Heroku is a great service that allows you to deploy your Rails apps, like Teambox, in just a few simple steps.

Get a Heroku account

You need to sign up for Heroku first. Then, install the “heroku” gem:

$ gem install heroku

Get Teambox code

To push an app to Heroku, you first need to have it locally. Teambox is versioned with git and available on GitHub.

$ git clone git://github.com/micho/teambox.git
$ cd teambox

Copy configuration files

You’ll need to copy the example configuration files to their proper names. If you move them instead of copy them, you’ll run into problems when you try to update Teambox.

$ cp config/database.example.yml config/database.yml
$ cp config/teambox.example.yml config/teambox.yml

Create a Heroku app

Time to create a Heroku instance. We’ll pick the “bamboo” stack:

$ heroku create --stack bamboo-ree-1.8.7

Your new instance will get a random name.

Enable add-ons (optional)

Note: Heroku might ask you to verify your account using a credit card before using add-ons.

Teambox uses memcache and sends outgoing email. Enabling that is easy:

$ heroku addons:add sendgrid:free
$ heroku addons:add memcache:5mb

Configure Amazon S3 for uploads

To run Teambox on Heroku, you need an Amazon S3 account. Heroku’s filesystem is read only, so you can’t store file uploads on the server. You also need to configure the environment with your credentials. Find your Amazon security credentials here.

$ heroku config:add S3_KEY=123 S3_SECRET=xzy S3_BUCKET=mybucket

Replace “mybucket” with a unique name of the bucket you wish to use.

Push the Teambox code

The final step is pushing Teambox code to your new Heroku instance.

$ git push heroku master
$ heroku rake db:schema:load

At this point, your app should be up and running! Open it in a browser:

$ heroku open

When you wish to rename it (it still has the random name) just run:

$ heroku rename fancy-new-name