Heroku: How to push different local Git branches to Heroku/master

435
votes

Heroku has a policy of ignoring all branches but 'master'.

While I'm sure Heroku's designers have excellent reasons for this policy (I'm guessing for storage and performance optimization), the consequence to me as a developer is that whatever local topic branch I may be working on, I would like an easy way to switch Heroku's master to that local topic branch and do a "git push heroku -f" to over-write master on Heroku.

What I got from reading the "Pushing Refspecs" section of http://progit.org/book/ch9-5.html is

git push -f heroku local-topic-branch:refs/heads/master

What I'd really like is a way to set this up in the configuration file so that "git push heroku" always does the above, replacing local-topic-branch with the name of whatever my current branch happens to be. If anyone knows how to accomplish that, please let me know!

The caveat for this, of course, is that this is only sensible if I am the only one who can push to that Heroku app/repository. A test or QA team might manage such a repository to try out different candidate branches, but they would have to coordinate so that they all agree on what branch they are pushing to it on any given day.

Needless to say, it would also be a very good idea to have a separate remote repository (like GitHub) without this restriction for backing everything up to. I'd call that one "origin" and use "heroku" for Heroku so that "git push" always backs up everything to origin, and "git push heroku" pushes whatever branch I'm currently on to Heroku's master branch, overwriting it if necessary.

Would this work?

[remote "heroku"]
    url = [email protected]:my-app.git
    push = +refs/heads/*:refs/heads/master

I'd like to hear from someone more experienced before I begin to experiment, although I suppose I could create a dummy app on Heroku and experiment with that.

As for fetching, I don't really care if the Heroku repository is write-only. I still have a separate repository, like GitHub, for backup and cloning of all my work.

Footnote: This question is similar to, but not quite the same as Good Git deployment using branches strategy with Heroku?

11
gitgithubherokupushgit-push
The currently most voted answer is the idiomatic way of doing this (and Imo the real correct answer) – Selali Adobor
An alternative https resource about pushing refspecs: git scm documentation about pushing refspecs. – Dylan Landry

11 Answers

142
votes

When using a wildcard, it had to be present on both sides of the refspec, so +refs/heads/*:refs/heads/master will not work. But you can use +HEAD:refs/heads/master:

git config remote.heroku.push +HEAD:refs/heads/master

Also, you can do this directly with git push:

git push heroku +HEAD:master
git push -f heroku HEAD:master
1619
votes

See https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/git#deploying-code

$ git push heroku yourbranch:master
77
votes
git push -f heroku local_branch_name:master
14
votes

For me, it works,

git push -f heroku otherBranch:master

The -f (force flag) is recommended in order to avoid conflicts with other developers’ pushes. Since you are not using Git for your revision control, but as a transport only, using the force flag is a reasonable practice.

source :- offical docs

11
votes

The safest command to push different local Git branches to Heroku/master.

git push -f heroku branch_name:master

Note: Although, you can push without using the -f, the -f (force flag) is recommended in order to avoid conflicts with other developers’ pushes.

6
votes

Also note that if your using the git flow system and your feature branch might be called 

feature/mobile_additions

and with a git remote called stagingtwo, then the command to push to heroku would be

git push stagingtwo feature/mobile_additions:master
4
votes

You should check out heroku_san, it solves this problem quite nicely.

For example, you could:

git checkout BRANCH
rake qa deploy

It also makes it easy to spin up new Heroku instances to deploy a topic branch to new servers:

git checkout BRANCH
# edit config/heroku.yml with new app instance and shortname
rake shortname heroku:create deploy # auto creates deploys and migrates

And of course you can make simpler rake tasks if you do something frequently.

4
votes
git push heroku $(git branch --show-current):master
1
votes

Heroku labs now offers a github add-on that let's you specify which branch to push.

See Heroku's write up on this beta feature.

You'll need to sign-up as a beta tester for the time-being.

0
votes

I think it should be

push = refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*

instead...