Hot deploy on Heroku with no downtime

Question

A bad side of pushing to Heroku is that I must push the code (and the server restarts automatically) before running my db migrations.

This can obviously cause some 500 errors on users navigating the website having the new code without the new tables/attributes: the solution proposed by Heroku is to use the maintenance mode, but I want a way with no downside letting my webapp running everytime!

Is there a way? For example with Capistrano:

• I prepare the code to deploy in a new dir
• I run (backward) migrations and the old code continue to work perfectly
• I swith mongrel instance to the new dir and restart the server

...and I have no downtime!

Answer 1

You could setup a second Heroku app which points to the same DB as your primary production app and use the secondary app to run your DB migrations without interrupting production (assuming the migrations don't break the previous version of your app).

Let's call the Heroku apps PRODUCTION and STAGING.

Your deploy sequence would become something like:

1. Deploy new code to STAGING
   git push heroku staging
2. Run database migrations on STAGING (to update PROD db)
   heroku run -a staging-app rake db:migrate
3. Deploy new code to PRODUCTION
   git push heroku production

The staging app won't cost you anything since you won't need to exceed Heroku's free tier and it would be pretty trivial to setup a rake deploy script to do this for you automatically.

Good luck!