Rails + Heroku + Amazon RDS - Production vs Development

Question

It is my first time working with a Rails app on Heroku. It uses a mysql db hosted on Amazon RDS. At some point I want to move it from development to production. I want to keep developing and adding features. What is the best way to accomplish this?

I see Heroku has some kind of staging app feature. Is that the best option for me to keep a separate app to test? And what about the database? I'm guessing I need to create a separate db on Amazon RDS for development and for production?

I am on a budget so I don't want to have to pay for 2 apps on Heroku and 2 db's on Amazon. Can I create both on the fly each time I do development work and then destroy them when I'm done, or is that too much? If so can I then copy the production data over to the development data? I would do local testing but I feel like I need to make sure it's working on Heroku as well.

I'm just trying to get a general idea of what workflow is best practice or most commonly used. Any comments are appreciated.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, as you're on RDS you're going to have to pay for two. If you were using Heroku Postgres you'd be able to get a simple small PG database for free.

Regarding applications - Heroku apps are free if you use less than 750 'dyno' hours a month (which is a little bit more than one dyno for an entire month), which is normally fine for staging small apps as long as you don't have masses of workers required.

You certainly could create the staging env whenever you need it, but only you know how complex this application is and what sort of overhead that would provide.