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

gitgit-pushgithubherokupush

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 = git@heroku.com: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?

Best Answer

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

$ git push heroku yourbranch:master

Related Solutions

Git – How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Synopsis
git clean [-d] [-f] [-i] [-n] [-q] [-e <pattern>] [-x | -X] [--] <path>…
Description

Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.

Normally, only files unknown to Git are removed, but if the -x option is specified, ignored files are also removed. This can, for example, be useful to remove all build products.

If any optional <path>... arguments are given, only those paths are affected.

Step 1 is to show what will be deleted by using the -n option:

# Print out the list of files and directories which will be removed (dry run)
git clean -n -d

Clean Step - beware: this will delete files:

# Delete the files from the repository
git clean -f

To remove directories, run git clean -f -d or git clean -fd
To remove ignored files, run git clean -f -X or git clean -fX
To remove ignored and non-ignored files, run git clean -f -x or git clean -fx

Note the case difference on the X for the two latter commands.

If clean.requireForce is set to "true" (the default) in your configuration, one needs to specify -f otherwise nothing will actually happen.

Again see the git-clean docs for more information.

Options

-f, --force

If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set to false, git clean will refuse to run unless given -f, -n or -i.

-x

Don’t use the standard ignore rules read from .gitignore (per directory) and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, but do still use the ignore rules given with -e options. This allows removing all untracked files, including build products. This can be used (possibly in conjunction with git reset) to create a pristine working directory to test a clean build.

-X

Remove only files ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.

-n, --dry-run

Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.

-d

Remove untracked directories in addition to untracked files. If an untracked directory is managed by a different Git repository, it is not removed by default. Use -f option twice if you really want to remove such a directory.

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

You can undo git add before commit with

git reset <file>

which will remove it from the current index (the "about to be committed" list) without changing anything else.

You can use

git reset

without any file name to unstage all due changes. This can come in handy when there are too many files to be listed one by one in a reasonable amount of time.

In old versions of Git, the above commands are equivalent to git reset HEAD <file> and git reset HEAD respectively, and will fail if HEAD is undefined (because you haven't yet made any commits in your repository) or ambiguous (because you created a branch called HEAD, which is a stupid thing that you shouldn't do). This was changed in Git 1.8.2, though, so in modern versions of Git you can use the commands above even prior to making your first commit:

"git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).

Documentation: git reset

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Synopsis

Description

Options

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

Related Topic