Deploy ember-cli + rails app in heroku?

Question

Has anyone deployed an ember-cli + rails app in Heroku like this one? https://github.com/bostonember/website If yes, how did/do you deploy?

I know that ember-cli produces all the necessary code in the dist/ dir, which should be placed (copied) under rails' public/ directory but I am not sure how and when to do that given that Heroku does not allow any write access in its filesystem. So if anyone has already done that, let me know :)

The reason that I chose ember-cli instead of the ember-rails gem is that I don't want to be dependent on any rails' gem developer. I think ember-cli is a good option as long as I can deploy efficiently in heroku :D

Answer 1

Dockyard worked through an example of this during a Boston Ember meetup. Here's the video.

They posted the code online, the important part being the deploy task of the rakefile:

task :deploy do
  sh 'git checkout production'
  sh 'git merge rails-served-html -m "Merging master for deployment"'
  sh 'rm -rf backend/public/assets'
  sh 'cd frontend && BROCCOLI_ENV=production broccoli build ../backend/public/assets && cd ..'

  unless `git status` =~ /nothing to commit, working directory clean/
    sh 'git add -A'
    sh 'git commit -m "Asset compilation for deployment"'
  end

  sh 'git subtree push -P backend heroku master'

  sh 'git checkout -'
end

Essentially, you copy the dist from ember-cli directly into Rails public folder, then deploy the rails subfolder as a rails app to Heroku using subtree. I've done this myself, and it works well.

Note that the approach in the "Lightening fast deployments" blog post @eXa linked to is ultimately better, since you can change your Ember app without touching or redploying your Rails app.