URL-Rewriting for Octopress on Heroku

2012-07-25

Time to celebrate! This blog now has its own domain, rampmeupscotty.com. It was about time— I didn’t like the default Heroku domain, rampmeupscotty.herokuapp.com. Way too long.

I already had another domain with Kontent, so they were my first choice. I also ordered their DNSPlus module to point DNS to my Heroku app.

Next, I had to tell Heroku to accept requests for rampmeupscotty.com. In my project directory (which contains all my Octopress code and posts) I ran:

$ heroku domains:add www.rampmeupscotty.com

However, even after pointing my browser to http://www.rampmeupscotty.com, the site redirected to rampmeupscotty.herokuapp.com— the native Heroku domain. I couldn’t leave it like that.

This post by Adam Wiggall helped me solve the problem.

First I installed bundler:

$ gem install bundler

Then I added this line to my Gemfile:

gem 'rack-rewrite'

The complete file looks as follows:

Gemfile

Next, I ran:

$ bundle install

Finally, I edited config.ru, adding the lines shown at 8 and 20:

config.ru

After pushing everything to Heroku, it worked as expected. Now the site shows only www.rampmeupscotty.com when browsing.

Done for today!