Today I got an email from heroku.com to beta test their rails hosting. Its pretty cool as it provides a web interface to setting up and editing your ruby on rails applications.
Within seconds of my getting the email, I had logged in and created a new rails app. Heroku automatically added a database.yml file pre-populated with the correct database connection info.
I wanted to see if I could get mephisto running quickly, as my host for unixmonkey.net had gone down last week and shows no sign of returning. I opened their interactive rake terminal and ran db:schema:load and db:bootstrap and my app was instantly available to me to log in and start configuring.
Everything was working fine for several hours while I was setting up to make my first huge post, but them I went to check it out at 6pm, it was down with a 500 error (ngnix), even the main heroku.com was down with a “zero sized reply”. But I checked again 2 hours or so later, and it was back up.
This is hands-down the easiest deployment I’ve ever seen. Either start with a fresh rails app, or import yours as a gzipped tar file. The only downsides so far:
* There is is a 10mb limit per app, so you can’t freeze rails in your vendor directory.
* There is a bandwidth limit I hit almost immediately after making my app public, and you can’t admin your site at all when overlimit, best you can do is export a dump of your app.
* Your app is always running in development mode. (production and other are planned for later release).
All these are likely just part of growing pains, and will be addressed eventually.
I sent an email to their support staff and my questions were addressed within hours, even late on a Saturday. You can tell its a labor of love.
Sign up for the beta. Its really cool.
