---
title: Heroku Wearing Suspenders
teaser: How to use suspenders to deploy apps to Heroku.
tags: web,rails,ruby,news,suspenders
author: Dan Croak
published_on: 2009-01-12
---

For our [Beginning Ruby on Rails][course] training course in Boston, January 29-30,
all attendees will be: **DEVELOPING ON [HEROKU](http://heroku.com)**.

[course]: http://thoughtbot.com/services/training/beginning-ruby-on-rails-boston

## Heroku handles headaches

![''](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2009-1-12-skull_xray_with_headache.jpg)Have
you ever tried to teach Rails to a friend? You want them to feel web development
with Rails.

However, consider the following issues:

* Your student may have never used the command line.
* Your student may be on Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, or another operating system.
* Your student may not have SQLite, MySQL, Ruby, Rubygems, or Rails installed
  correctly.
* Your student may have never used a text editor such as
  [Vim](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/thoughtbot-is-filled-with-vim-and-vigor),
  Emacs, Textmate, or gedit.

I believe Heroku elegantly solves these problems. Get your friends excited about
Rails development without boring or confusing them with ancillary information.

Matt Knox of [Sermo](http://sermo.com) has been teaching Rails to other members
of [Boston.rb](http://bostonrb.org) using Heroku. This is really a great idea so
we're stealing it.

## Heroku instructions

### Prerequisites

* an internet connection
* a [Heroku account](http://heroku.com/beta)

### Create new app

On the [My Apps](http://heroku.com/myapps) page, click the Create new app
button. You'll see the following:

![''](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2009-1-12-Picture_2.png)

Your Rails app is **immediately up and running** on Heroku, which runs on top of
[Amazon Web Services](http://aws.amazon.com/). It displays the default Rails
public page with modified instructions.

### Suspenders

Clicking on the import a tarball link displays:

![''](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2009-1-12-Picture_9.png)

Save this [Suspenders](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/suspenders) tarball:

[![''](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2009-1-12-tar.png)](http://dev.thoughtbot.com/training/blog.tar.gz)

Now import it into Heroku using the form.

### Use the online editor

After importing, you'll see your app's view again.

Now click on the Edit your app link. An **in-browser text editor** displays:

![''](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2009-1-12-Picture_12.png)

You can see Suspenders is now installed, giving us access to the latest
[Shoulda](http://thoughtbot.com/projects/shoulda), [Factory
Bot](http://thoughtbot.com/projects/factory_bot), rake tasks,
[Hoptoad](http://hoptoadapp.com) Notifier, and much, much more.

That's it! We've got Heroku wearing Suspenders, an excellent, standardized
environment to teach Rails wherein students can learn **the important stuff**
first, such as actual [Test Driven
Development](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development) with Rails,
instead of fiddling with their OS, gems, or text editor.