Good Git deployment using branches strategy with Heroku?

Question

What is a good deployment strategy to use with Git + Heroku (Ruby on Rails)?

Currently, the way I work with my origin Git repository: All features (or \'stories\') are f

Answer 1

There are a variety of ways to go about this, and it really depends on your preference.

I'll give you one possible strategy off the top of my head: Given you already have an automated staging setup that uses master, I would suggest creating a 'production' branch. When you want to promote a fix/feature to production, you would just merge the topic branch into your 'production' branch.

git checkout production
git pull . my-topic-branch
(resolve any conflicts)

When you are ready to actually push that code to your production server, you should tag the branch using a unique name (probably with a timestamp). Then you simply push the production branch to Heroku.

git checkout production
git tag release-200910201249

I'd suggest creating a script or git alias to automate the tagging for timestamps, since using a consistent naming scheme is important. I use something like this:

git config alias.dtag '!git tag release-`date "+%Y%m%d%H%M"`'

That allows me to do just type git dtag when I want to tag a release with a timestamp.

You can view you tags using git tag and view them using git show release-1234. For more information on tags, run git help tag. You may also find this Github guide on tagging helpful. I'd also recommend reading up other people's workflows (here's a nice writeup) and pick and choose what works for you.