Planter

Planter helps streamline the engineering and QA process for your Rails app by making it easy to create issue specific seed files for pull requests.

Requirements

• A Rails app with the Planter gem installed
• GitHub issues for issue tracking
• An app deployed to Heroku and using review apps

Usage

Issue specific seed files

When a Heroku review app is deployed, planter will look at the associated pull request on GitHub and look for the issues that the pull request is closing using the available GitHub keywords for closing issues via pull requests.

Issue specific seed files can be generated using the issue number. For example, the following command will generate an issue specific seed file for GitHub issue #42:

$ rails generate planter:plant 42

Once generated, the file can be found and edited at db/plant/issue_42.rb.

When a pull request that closes issue #42 is deployed as a Heroku review app, the seed method in that file will be executed.

Here as an example containing all the different keywords that would activate the Planter seed file for issue #42.

The deseed method will be executed when the review app is eventually destroyed. This method is useful if there are changes that were made by the seed method outside of the review app's environment that need reverting.

Default seed file

In db/plant, you will also find a file named default.rb. Define any actions that you want performed for every review app in here.

Installation

Include planter in your Gemfile:

gem "planter", git: "https://github.com/ableco/planter.git", tag: "v0.1.4"

And then execute:

$ bundle install
$ rails generate planter:install

The Planter install script will create a db/plant folder with the default seed file. It will also generate the following initializer file:

Planter.configure do |config|
  config.github_access_token         = ENV["GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN"]
  config.github_repository_full_name = ENV["GITHUB_REPOSITORY_FULL_NAME"]
  config.heroku_app_name             = ENV["HEROKU_APP_NAME"]
end

HEROKU_APP_NAME is automatically set but you will need to define GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN and GITHUB_REPOSITORY_FULL_NAME in the Heroku config yourself. These variables are used to read the pull requests associated with your review apps.

Your Heroku review apps need to be configured to run the Planter rake tasks after deploy and before destroy. This can be accomplished by updating your app.json file to use the buildpack-ruby-rake-deploy-tasks custom buildpack.

Here's an example app.json file:

{
  "name": "Planter",
  "website": "https://github.com/ableco/planter",
  "repository": "https://github.com/ableco/planter",
  "scripts": {
    "pr-predestroy": "bundle exec rake planter:deseed"
  },
  "env": {
    "GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN": {
      "required": true
    },
    "GITHUB_REPOSITORY_FULLNAME": {
      "required": true
    },
    "HEROKU_APP_NAME": {
      "required": true
    },
    "DISABLE_DATABASE_ENVIRONMENT_CHECK": "1",
    "DEPLOY_TASKS": "db:schema:load db:seed planter:seed RAILS_ENV=production"
  },
  "buildpacks": [
    {
      "url": "https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby.git"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://github.com/ableco/buildpack-ruby-rake-deploy-tasks"
    }
  ]
}