Deploying to Heroku with sensitive setting information

Question

I'm using GitHub for code and Heroku for the deployment platform for my rails app.

I don't want to have sensitive data under Git. Such data include database file settings (database.yml) and some other files that have secret API keys.

When I deploy to heroku, how can I deal with files that are not under revision control.

When I use Capistrano, I can write some hook methods, but I don't know what to do with Heroku.

Answer 1

For Heroku, you'll need to have database.yml under Git because Heroku will automatically read it and create a PostgreSQL configuration from it.

For other sensitive information such as API keys, Heroku provide config vars which are effectively environment variables. You can add them using:

heroku config:add KEY=value

—and access them from within your application using:

ENV['KEY']

Note that config vars can be listed, added and removed using the heroku command-line program and that once set they are persistent.

• Heroku Config Vars documentation