Noveku

A collection of aliases we use when interacting with heroku. This gem was inspired by a collection of thoughtbot aliases.

Prerequisites

Ruby 1.9+ only. This gem depends on novelys/gomon. However, the presence of the command heroku (either via the gem, or the toolbelt) is assumed

Installation

gem install noveku. Since it will not be part of your application, only of your workflow, you should install it globally, not via bundler and your project's Gemfile.

Usage

This gem is developed with Rails 3+ in mind. However, it should be suited to any project with a notion of "app environment", with different heroku apps for these environments.

noveku production COMMAND translate COMMAND in the context of the heroku remote heroku-production. When pushing/deploying, the local source branche is production. Please read the next two paragraphs for more detailed explications.

Conventions

This gem makes a few assumptions about how your branches and remotes are named. This is not configurable, and that there is no plans to change this.

  • origin is the main git remote, pointing towards github, bitbucket, or any other server.
  • if you have a branch named novelys, the heroku git remote corresponding this branch is assumed to be heroku-novelys.

Our git flow at Novelys is pretty straightforward : the branch master is the current version of the app; staging is the pre-production version; production the production one.

This translates to two heroku apps (the name of the apps does not matter), and the remotes named heroku-staging and heroku-master :

[remote "heroku-production"]
  url = [email protected]:sampleapp.git
  fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/production/*
[remote "heroky-staging"]
  url = [email protected]:sampleapp-preprod.git
  fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/staging/*

Interface

Considering what is written above :

noveku ENV COMMAND: will execute the given COMMAND in the context of the ENV local branch and heroku-ENV heroku git remote.

Heroku commands

Supported commands and their equivalent :

  • rake : heroku run rake ARGS --remove ENV
  • console: heroku run console --remote ENV
  • migrate: heroku run rake db:migrate --remote ENV && heroku restart --remote ENV
  • tail: heroku logs --tail --remote ENV

When giving a command that is not specifically supported, it will be passed to heroku : heroku ARGS --remote ENV.
This makes several other commands available, such as restart, releases, ps, open...

Advanced commands

Git

Those commands are shortcuts for other git commands.

  • push: Push your changes in your local branch to the origin remote.
  • deploy: Push your changes in your local branch to the heroku remote.

They accept the following options:

  • --dry-run: only prints the git command that is going to be executed, without executing it;
  • --verbose: prints the git command that is going to be executed, and then execute it.

MongoDB

  • mongodump: Dumps the mongo database. Shortcut for both mongolab_dump and mongohq_dump: tries mongolab first, then mongohq.
  • mongolab_dump: Dumps the mongo database. Look in the config keys of ENV to find MONGOLAB_URI.
  • mongohq_dump: Dumps the mongo database. Look in the config keys of ENV to find MONGOHQ_URL.

Those commands put the dump in the dump dir, relatively to where you executed it.

Since the restoration of the database does not involve any interaction with heroku, it is out of the scope of this gem at the moment. However, this gem depends on novelys/gomon, which includes a class wrapping mongodump/restore, making it very easy to use in a rake task.

What's next

I plan on adding a command allowing you to create a heroku app, setup your addons, update your git config, create a local branch if needed.. all that in one step. We're still thinking about what the command api will look like. This will probably be the last feature before tagging 1.0.0.

Contributions

  1. Check for open issues or open a fresh issue to start a discussion around a feature idea or a bug. In the first case, please include a use-case.
  2. Fork the repository on Github, make a feature branch, work on this branch.
  3. If necessary, write a test which shows that the bug was fixed or that the feature works as expected.
  4. Send a pull request and annoy us until we notice it. :)

Changelog

  • 0.6: Adds deploy and push; assumes heroku remotes are prefixed with heroku-; enhanced README; internal refactoring.
  • 0.5: Test coverage, check the presence of environment & that it matches a heroku app, that pwd is a heroku app, the presence of mongohq/lab uri.
  • 0.4: Require gomon for mongodump, changed executable names, internal refactoring.
  • 0.3: Added mongodump, mongolab_dump, mongohq_dump.
  • 0.2: Added rake command.
  • 0.1: First version. Available commands : console, migrate, tail.