Auto-Deploy GitHub Repos to Heroku

My favorite new feature on Heroku is the GitHub Integration which enables auto-deployment of GitHub repos. Whenever a change is made on GitHub the app can be automatically redeployed on Heroku. You can even tell Heroku to wait until the CI tests pass before doing the deployment. I now use this on almost all of my Heroku apps because it allows me to move faster and do less thinking (which I’m fond of).

For apps like jamesward.com I just enable deployment straight to production. But for apps that need a less risky setup I have a full Continuous Delivery pipeline that looks like this:

  1. Push to GitHub
  2. CI Validates the build
  3. Heroku deploys changes to staging
  4. Manual testing / validation of staging
  5. Using Heroku Pipelines, promote staging to production

I’m loving the flexibility and simplicity of this new feature! Check out a quick screencast to see how to setup and use Heroku GitHub auto-deployment:

Notice that none of this required a command line! How cool is that?!?