

Introducing Heroku Fork - Lightning
https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/6/27/heroku-fork

======
bgentry
Fun fact: `heroku fork` is implemented entirely in the CLI client using pre-
existing APIs:
[https://github.com/heroku/heroku/blob/master/lib/heroku/comm...](https://github.com/heroku/heroku/blob/master/lib/heroku/command/fork.rb)

If you wanted to build something like this, you could do so without any
involvement from us by just using the (newly-documented) Heroku Platform API:
[https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platform-api-
reference](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platform-api-reference)

------
tomphoolery
Fuck you, Heroku!

I made something similar to this for Diaspora:
[https://bitbucket.org/tubbo/replicator](https://bitbucket.org/tubbo/replicator)

Guess it's not needed anymore! :) Incidentally, if you for some reason want to
bake this functionality into an existing gem, it may be easier to use
Replicator's library than the Heroku API, since I had to read their source to
understand how it all worked. That is, if for some reason you don't want to
drop down to the command line and run `heroku fork` from Ruby.

~~~
bgentry
Hopefully the new version of our API would make that kind of thing easier in
the future since it's very thoroughly documented:
[https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platform-api-
reference](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platform-api-reference)

------
sergiotapia
Suddenly setting up a staging environment doesn't suck.

------
lquist
Looks great! Unfortunately after the RapGenius fiasco, I don't trust Heroku as
a service provider.

~~~
brentm
Every company makes mistakes. Who hasn't fallen behind on site copy? Granted
their responsibility to keep documentation up to date is much greater than
most of ours but I'd like to think (and I believe) they were not willfully
deceiving their entire Rails customer base. I am still a fan.

~~~
dantheman
But they didn't correct the problem -- they should have refunded at least some
of their costs.

~~~
gojomo
Are you sure they didn't?

Refunds could easily have been something evaluated on a 1-by-1 basis, quietly,
to avoid creating a stampede of requests even by those negligibly affected.

Notably, despite all the public feuding, RapGenius today still appears to be
served by Heroku.

------
cicloid
_trashes old automation scripts_

Finally it came out of beta... Probably one of the best features for a sane
development workflow.

~~~
gkop
Is it officially out of beta? I tried it a couple weeks ago and found that it
didn't successfully re-provision several of my add-ons.

~~~
ryandaigle
Add-on provisioning can fail (independent of fork). In that case fork still
continues the rest of the process.

If you find it's always the same addon(s), please let us know.

------
trevorhartman
Imagine how easy-to-use AWS would be if AMZ had anywhere close to the level of
focus on usability that Heroku consistently demonstrates.

~~~
andrewguenther
And imagine how limited it's capabilities would be!

~~~
trevorhartman
I'm not suggesting dumbing-down their product in any way. I'm talking about a
usable, well-designed CLI and web console.

They've made quite a few incremental improvements over the years, but it's
still mediocre at best.

------
fleaflicker
_Copies the source app 's Heroku Postgres data, if present._

Won't that take a prohibitively long time for large apps?

~~~
jmathai
At least they give fair warning..

[https://github.com/heroku/heroku/blob/master/lib/heroku/comm...](https://github.com/heroku/heroku/blob/master/lib/heroku/command/fork.rb#L105)

------
chameco
Now if only Github added Heroku integration, so you could fork apps AND code
straight from the repo.

~~~
nahname
There are quite a few companies playing in that space right now. Personally,
if that is your challenge, I wonder what you are even doing making products.
Let me write the deployment script for you:

    
    
      heroku create
      git push heroku master

------
codebeaker
Is this really HN worthy? It must be a pretty easy feature to implement with
their slug/container workflow. With technologies such as Docker pushing them,
Heroku ought to find a way to lower their prices. This at least adds value,
but no magic here.

~~~
cuttooth
You could ask the same thing of 90% of the stuff here

