Deploying to Heroku with existing data

Question

Currently on Ch 2 of Hartl's tutorial in which I make a simple app with users and microposts.

I add a few users and microposts to the database.

Near the end of the chapter, it gets you to deploy the app to Heroku. When I view the app on Heroku however, there are no users or microposts anymore.

How do I get the existing data to be deployed as well?

Answer 1

If you're using postgres you can push your local database to your heroku app doing the following:

Checkout your config/database.yml file to see what the development database is named. For this example I'll call it cool_development. Then once you have run:

git push heroku master

Then run the migrations to create the database: heroku run rake db:migrate Then push your database to heroku: heroku pg:push cool_development DATABASE_URL --app app_name_here

The database heroku creates for you is accessed using the DATABASE_URL environment variable so you don't need to change anything in the above line except for the local database name unless your app is named 'cool' lol.

Answer 2

Use YamlDb gem to dump data to a yaml file.

Create data dump by:

rake db:data:dump   ->   Dump contents of Rails database to db/data.yml

Push code to Heroku:

git push heroku master

Load data to heroku database:

heroku run rake db:data:load   ->   Load contents of db/data.yml into the database

Answer 3

Heroku has different database than your app locally. So every data you created in the local app will not be pushed to Heroku when you run git push heroku master

I would create a database dump (maybe the Seed Dump is interesting) so you can import this in Heroku or you could place the users and microposts in a seed file and run heroku run rake db:seed

http://railscasts.com/episodes/179-seed-data gives an brief explanation on how you could seed the db