Nanoc Heroku

A skeleton nanoc application that supports rendering haml, compass, coffeescript, markdown and builder right out of the box, and deploys the website to Heroku for free with ease in a matter of seconds.

Prepare

git clone git://github.com/meskyanichi/nanoc-heroku.git my_site_name
cd my_site_name && git remote rm origin && bundle

Start the file server

Move in to the root directory of the new website and run:

cd /path/to/my_site_name
nanoc view

Auto-compiling when you update files

Move in to the root directory of the new website in a new shell window and run:

cd /path/to/my_site_name
guard start

Now visit http://127.0.0.1:3000/ and there you go. This should display your website. Each time you update a file that changes the look of the web page, Guard will run the nanoc compiler to update the end result which you can directly view in the browser.

Templating and Scripting with

• HAML
• SASS with the Compass framework
• CoffeeScript
• Markdown
• Builder

Auto-compiling with

• Guard when files are changed

Also contains Rake tasks for

• Optimizing JPG and PNG images (using jpegoptim/optipng OSX/Ubuntu packages)
• Compressing Stylesheet and JavaScript files (using YUI Compressor Gem)

Heroku Deployment

Even though this is a static site, it is nice to be able to deploy to Heroku's platform to remove any form of server management. Whether it's deployment, maintaining the web server, maintaining the actual server and operating system itself. Not having to worry whether the site is up or crashed, and so forth. Not to mention, this solution is completely free and takes no time to set up!

First of all, ensure you have a Heroku account. Once you're ready to deploy, ensure you have created a Heroku application to deploy to.

heroku create myapp --stack cedar

Be sure you pass the --stack cedar to the command to create a Celadon Cedar stack, this is required.

Next, be sure your code has been committed on the "master" branch and that it is ready to be deployed. Once ready, run the following command:

rake deploy

This will create a new branch called "deployment" and switch to it. It will then do all the dirty work such as setting the base_url, re-compiling the whole website (after removing the old ./output directory), optimizing all assets (css/js/images), add and commit it. Then it will push the "deployment" branch to "heroku:master". Your website should now be deployed. Once done it'll automatically switch back to the "master" branch and remove the "deployment" branch, so you're back where you were prior to the deployment procedure.