How to set up RefineryCMS with Heroku and Amazon AWS assets

Question

I've spent most of the last three days struggling with installing RefineryCMS on Heroku.

There are a lot of questions on SO and on various blogs, as well as documentation from Refinery and Heroku (and Rails) but none of the walkthroughs have helped 100%... Every page seems to be missing some vital piece of information.

I've tried to document all the necessary steps having gone through them three or four times, refining the procedure each time (working out what is and isn't necessary).

References included where they were obvious.

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

Run the refinery initialisation script, with Heroku option

refinerycms myapp --heroku

From http://refinerycms.com/guides/heroku

The output should give you a new heroku app and its name listed in the output:

"Creating Heroku app.. run heroku create --stack cedar from "." Creating ... done, stack is cedar http://[your heroku app].herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:[your heroku app].git Git remote heroku added"

Create bucket on Amazon AWS…

Should be self-explanatory.

Set connection info for Amazon in the Heroku environment

We need both sets of credentials.

AWS_* and FOG_* is for Heroku (and the rails precompile, I believe).
S3_* stuff is for Refinery to be able to upload images etc.

heroku config:add AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="<your key>" AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="<your secret>" FOG_DIRECTORY="<your bucket name>" FOG_PROVIDER="AWS" FOG_REGION="<your aws region>"

heroku config:add S3_BUCKET="<your bucket name>" S3_KEY="<your key>" S3_REGION="<your aws region>" S3_SECRET="<your secret>"

Add required gems to your Gemfile

gem 'globalize3', '0.3.0'

From refinerycms not working when adding page

gem 'unf'

(fixes some warnings)

gem 'rails_12factor'

From Why is the rails_12factor gem necessary on Heroku?

gem 'asset_sync'

From https://github.com/rumblelabs/asset_sync. This gem seems the only way to get the assets pushed up to the cloud... Although perhaps you can make do without it; perhaps someone else can confirm.

ruby '2.0.0' 
      [ place this at the end of the Gemfile. (Needed to clear Heroku warnings) ]

Add asset_sync asset host path in config/environments/production.rb

config.action_controller.asset_host = "//#{ENV['FOG_DIRECTORY']}.s3.amazonaws.com"

From https://github.com/rumblelabs/asset_sync

Set the site name in config/initializers/refinery/core.rb

config.site_name = <your site name>

Set the s3_backend in the config/environments/production.rb

Refinery::Core.config.s3_backend = true

From https://github.com/refinery/refinerycms/issues/1879

Configure database details

Remove sqlite3 in config/database.yml and setting postgresql instead: this is optional but recommended by Heroku and others

For adapter:

sqlite3 => postgresql

For database name:

db/foo.sqlite3 => <sitename>_foo

Set user-env-precompile settings

heroku labs:enable user-env-compile -a myapp

From https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/labs-user-env-compile

Run the Bundler

bundle install

Note: First of all, I had to run, as prompted:
1. rvm use 2.0.0 in order to match the version we're using in Gemfile 2. bundle update globalize3

From refinerycms not working when adding page

Create (local) production database

RAILS_ENV=production rake db:create

Set environment variables needed before asset precompile can work

(this is for *nix, do whatever you need to on your platform)

export FOG_DIRECTORY="<your bucket name>"
export FOG_PROVIDER="AWS"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="<your secret>"
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="<your key>"

Precompile the assets (???)

NOTE: This MAY NOT be required... (I did do this step each time but cannot be sure whether it's required. The next steps suggest to me it's not necessary to manually precompile: we need to change the "initialize_on_precompile" to false, run a git push to heroku (i.e. without assets), then set the "initialize_on_precompile" back to true for future pushes. Not sure why we need to do this, and it may be an issue only with Rails 3.* (see: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails-asset-pipeline)

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile

Set precompile false in config/application.rb

config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false

From http://refinerycms.com/guides/heroku…

This setting is required the first time you git push to heroku, because otherwise the precompile step of git push heroku master always fails with:

Connecting to database specified by DATABASE_URL rake aborted! could not connect to server: Connection refused Is the server running on host "127.0.0.1" and accepting TCP/IP connections on port 5432?

NOTE: The reference is not clear on this (although setting intially to false then true is mentioned elsewhere).

Check in files to git and commit changes

Note: add the Gemfile.lock along with all the other changes.

Push to heroku

git push heroku master

Set precompile option back to true in config/application.rb

config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = true