Deploy Your Rails API

Set a Root

Do this in your Rails api project directory (This example is from a "Noticeboard" API).

Make a controller with a method that you can use as the root of your project:

rails generate controller welcome

This will make app/controllers/welcome_controller.rb

If you don't set a root, Heroku will get confused. Let's make it so our app will root to the index method of the welcome controller:

In config/routes.rb:

root 'welcome#index'

In the welcome controller file, let's send some stuff from the index method:

  def index
    render json: { status: 200, message: "Noticeboard API" }
  end

Open your Rails API in the browser to check that the root works

• Add, commit and push your welcome and root stuff to Github in preparation for pushing to Heroku

Set up Heroku and Push

In the directory of your own desktop copy of the Rails api, create and deploy a heroku app with the following commands:

• heroku create <name_of_app>

Example from a books app:

• git push heroku master

If it works, you should be able to open your live API with:

• heroku open

Production Database

Set up your database:

• heroku run rails db:migrate

If you have seed data:

• heroku run rails db:seed

You can run Rails on heroku commands with heroku run <rails command>

• heroku run rails c

Note that this is your production database, you should not run any commands to drop or reset. heroku run rails db:reset will raise an error.