Installing on Heroku

Heroku is a great service that allows you to deploy your Rails apps, like Teambox, on a server with only some simple commands.

Get a Heroku account

Go to Heroku, sign up and and configure your SSH keys and gems.

Pull Teambox code locally

In order to configure your own copy of Teambox, we’ll clone it locally.
This guide is assuming you use Mac, Linux or any UNIX-like system.

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

Create a remote repository at heroku.com

Teambox is now using Bundler, so its easier to setup Heroku with “bamboo-stack”

heroku create --stack bamboo-ree-1.8.7

Your site will be created at http://your-site-name.heroku.com.

Configure your deployment

Configure Teambox:
Edit config/teambox.yml to set your domain name and email information.

You will need to use S3 uploads, so edit config/amazon_s3.yml with your Amazon S3 keys.

A good service for outgoing email is Sendgrid. You can also use GMail.

If you already have a sendgrid account:

host: smtp.sendgrid.net
username: your@username.com
password: your_password
auth: plain
port: 25
enable_starttls_auto: false
safe_from: true

If you don’t have a sendgrid account, you may want to use Heroku sendgrid add-on:

From the command line:

heroku addons:add sendgrid:free

In your config/teambox.yml

host: smtp.sendgrid.net
username: ENV['SENDGRID_USERNAME']
password: ENV['SENDGRID_PASSWORD']
auth: plain
port: 25
enable_starttls_auto: false
safe_from: true

Note for GMail

Gmail will require you to enabled TLS.

enable_starttls_auto: true

Configure Bundler to use PostgreSQL

By default Teambox use MySQL, edit the Gemfile to bundle PostgreSQL instead.

Change the line:

gem 'mysql'

For:

gem 'pg', :group => :production
gem 'mysql', '~> 2.8.1', :group => :development

You may want to run bundle install to see if everything work correctly

bundle install --without production

make sure its lock

bundle lock

Send your app to Heroku

Now we will put the app online. We need to add a plugin to compile CSS stylesheets from SASS and Javascript from Sprockets, because of Heroku’s read-only system. We’ll be using hassle and sprockets_on_heroku plugins.

*hassle has no support for SASS3 style directory structure, so we will be using a fork from thedigitalants

script/plugin install git://github.com/thedigitalants/hassle.git
script/plugin install git://github.com/jeffrydegrande/sprockets_on_heroku.git
git add .
git commit -am "sass and sprockets heroku plugins"
git push heroku master

Build the database on the server

Now we need to populate the database with the schema.

heroku rake db:auto:migrate

Now you can go to http://your-site-name.heroku.com and start using Teambox!

Updating Heroku

If you want to update Teambox with the newest version, simply run these:

git pull origin master
git push heroku master