Thomas Step

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I recently launched a Slack app to help with channel bloat! Simply installing it would help me out a bunch. I have 2/10 installations required to submit my app to the Slack Marketplace. Thanks for helping me reach that goal.

Using Heroku

After getting a decent amount of my Ruby on Rails school project done, I needed to deploy it. The recommended way to do this was through Heroku. I am personally now a fan of Heroku, but I do not claim to know all (or even much) about it. I just followed some guides from their website about deploying a Ruby on Rails app. Honestly this could have been a painless process if I had known what I was doing from the start. The next time that I am creating a proeject and I know that I am going to deploy it to Heroku, I am going to start off differently by deploying the default project before I start actually making anything. I had some weird integer error that I could not complete figure out. I wish I still had the exact logs where the error came from. The logs told me that there was a base64 error, but I could not track down where the actual error stemmed from. It turned out that the master key that I uploaded did not properly match what Heroku was trying to use, so Heroku could not decrypt anything. The fix was to set an environment variable in Heroku using heroku config:set RAILS_MASTER_KEY=<config/master.key> where <config/master.key> is the contents of that file in your Rails app. To me Heroku is a great way to easily deploy a web application without having to go through all of the hardcore hosting troubles that I feel like you would normally have to. Best of all is that it is free for hobbyists. You can easily scale your application and give it a real domain name, but if you just want to mess around and throw an app up onto the web, this is probably one of the easiest ways to do that.

Categories: ops