Deploy A Free, Ruby Powered Blog In 5 Minutes with Toto and Heroku

By Peter Cooper

Toto (GitHub repo) is a new lightweight Ruby and Rack-based blogging engine designed specifically for "hackers" by Alexis Sellier. Content is managed entirely through Git - so everything is version controlled - and articles are stored as text files with embedded YAML metadata. At only 300 lines, it's easy to hack to your own taste, too.

Alexis has decided to push Toto by demonstrating how easy it is to deploy - for free - on the Heroku platform. You can literally get a blog up on Heroku within 5 minutes, even if you haven't already got a Heroku account (I just tried it).

How To Do It

Here are the basic steps:

Sign up for an account at Heroku.com - all you have to do is provide an e-mail address, validate it, then enter a password.

gem install heroku

git clone git://github.com/cloudhead/dorothy.git your-blog-dir

cd your-blog-dir

heroku create

Use the URL returned by heroku create and add a line in to the Toto::Server.new block in config.ru like: set :url, 'http://your.heroku.url.here'

and add a line in to the block in like: git commit -am "Added URL"

git push heroku master

You're live!

It's that simple - I just tried it (see http://furious-fire-87.heroku.com for a live demo)! Beyond this stage, you need to check out Toto's documentation and actually add some posts to your Toto install, customize the template, and what not.

If you're interested in lightweight systems like Toto, check out Scanty and Jekyll (which includes a blog-like system but at heart is designed to cope with full sites).