We’ve entered the final weeks of Hack Reactor and are a week into our final thesis projects. My team has decided to build a turn-key mobile app for realtors - so realtors can quickly put together a mobile app to showcase listings in their area.
We agreed on a building hybrid mobile app using the AppGyver’s Supersonic framework. To power our app we opted to create a simple Rails API to fetch and return MLS listings data.
Having used Heroku for hosting on several projects we figured it would be an easy way to get our API up and running quickly. Not so fast…
App Structure
When you start a Supersonic app you start with a structure similar to this:
- .git/
- .gitignore
- app/
- bower_components/
- bower.json
- config/
- dist/
- logs/
- node_modules/
- package.json
The problem comes when adding the Heroku app into the mix. Heroku also wants to live in the root, and you would typically deploy your Heroku app doing a push to your heroku master repository.
The issue with this setup is the Supersonic files would confuse Heroku. To get around this we created our Heroku app in a subdirectory named web/. Our directory structure now looks like this:
- .git/
- .gitignore
- app/
- bower_components/
- bower.json
- config/
- dist/
- logs/
- node_modules/
- package.json
- web/
- Heroku app files
With this structure we can’t use the recommended Heroku deployment. Instead, we want to deploy only the contents of web/. To do this we use a git subtree push.
With our Heroku app in web/ we now deploy to Heroku using:
git subtree push --prefix web heroku master
So far we’ve had no problems with this setup. Supersonic and Heroku living in peace.
UPDATE
After working on our project for about a week we came across an issue. We started getting fast-forward issues after others team members deployed to Heroku. Once another team member deployed to Heroku are usual deployment command of:
git subtree push --prefix web heroku master
no longer worked.
The reason being our local branch was behind the Heroku remote. Even after attempting a pull from the Heroku remote we were still having issues. The solution was this:
git push heroku 'git subtree split --prefix web branch':master --force
where web is the subdirectory where you Heroku app lives.
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