King & McGaw Developers

I’ve been meaning to try the fork feature on Heroku for a while.

It does exactly what you expect, but that’s what’s so brilliant about it. It’s taken be less than 2 minutes to set up a staging environment for one of our apps in the EU region. Here’s what’s involved:

Clone an existing app, optionally choosing a region. This will also add your add-ons to the forked app at the same payment tier so keep an eye out for this.

heroku fork -a yourapp yourapp-staging --region eu

Creating fork yourapp-staging... done
Copying slug... done
Adding airbrake:developer... done
Adding memcachier:100... done
Adding scheduler:standard... done
Copying config vars... done
Fork complete, view it at http://yourapp-staging.herokuapp.com/

Get the forked app’s Git repo information so you can push code to it.

heroku info -a yourapp-staging

=== yourapp-staging
Addons:        memcachier:dev
               scheduler:standard

Git URL:       git@heroku.com:yourapp-staging.git
Owner Email:   nick@nickboyce.com
Region:        eu
Stack:         cedar
Tier:          Legacy
Web URL:       http://yourapp-staging.herokuapp.com/

Add a new git remote so you can push to the new app.

git remote add staging git@heroku.com:yourapp-staging.git

Push a branch to your new app.

git push staging custom-framing:master

You’re done!