open heroku command line
do heroku run composer install
then heroku run php artisan migrate
to setup the tables
then heroku run php artisan db:seed
to seed the db
if you get any database errors or when migrating, try doing php artisan migrate:reset
then php artisan migrate
Also, check your composer.json file and make sure you have "fzaninotto/faker"
under require
. If you only have it under require-dev
then it's not being installed when you deploy on production unless you used the dev flag heroku run composer install --dev
Refer to Deployment on Laravel Forge throwing faker not found Exception
And to also answer your question, it's generally better to ignore the vendor folder and use composer to install dependencies, hence gitignore.