Spree is the webshop solution for Ruby on Rails, and Heroku is the place to host your Rails-applications – especially if you like free hosting 
Finding myself in the need of a webshop, I decided to try to deploy Spree to Heroku. It wasn’t too hard, but it did take a few tricks to get Spree running on a server that doesn’t allow you to write to the file system.
I can’t say I have too much hands-on experience with Spree yet, but it seems to be have borrowed its extension concept from Radiant CMS, which happens to be one of my areas of expertise. So I put together an extension for Spree that will easily allow you to deploy the e-commerce system to Heroku.
Just follow the instructions in the README on Github.
Hey Casper!
Thanks for a great blog post. I followed the steps in the instructions, and it works perfectly.
However, I would like to clone the spree source code, install the heroku extension, and deploy to Heroku.
When I try this, I get an error saying
“/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:1262:in `initialize’: Read-only file system”
I followed the exact same steps as for the spree gem. Do you have any ideas why this does not work?
Thanks a lot!
Hi Magne,
Glad you could use it. As for the error you get when cloning the Spree master repository, it could be for a number of reasons. Obviously the error is related to some code trying to write to disk, but as you haven’t included the stacktrace, I can’t see where it happens. Most likely it is Rails trying to cache some stylesheets or javascripts.
I have patched one specific error related to that I got with the 0.9.1 gem, but this can easily have changed in the “edge” version of Spree you get by cloning the repository. I will upgrade my extension to work with 0.9.2 when I have the time (perhaps it already does, you tell me?), but I can’t really play catch up with the edge version of Spree
Cheers,
Casper
Hi Magne,
Sorry to keep you waiting a bit longer this time. Nothing is clear from the stacktrace, since for the interesting part is just says ” … 34 levels…”
However, I’d guess that it is trying the write the blank_iframe.html file – or perhaps delete it? Do you have some sort of extension that tries to generate this file perhaps?
/Casper
Hi Casper, great extension. Was wondering what’s the best way to turn off the extension in dev mode?
Thanks for your help!
Well, I’m pretty sure it works just like plugins: By default, all extensions are loaded alphabetically, and if you want it any other way you must specify the extensions you want to load in the config.
So, and I have not tested this, you could probably put something like this in your config/development.rb:
Hope this helps
Hi Casper, thanks for the post. Can you clarify is this still the standard way of deploying spree on heroku?
hi there, thanks for this post. I am not a programer but would like to have my own site with spree on heroku.
I am having trouble getting started on Heroku. the main reason i am using Heroku, is because i like spree. can you help me with a step by step on how to load spree on heroku. I have a mac.
I have done a lot of php stuff, i have a few website but never on heroku.
thanks
ash