How to update a Heroku app installed using a ‘deploy to Heroku’ Button

The other day I received an email from Heroku saying that their Cedar-14 stack was being deprecated, which meant that we needed to update Code Youngstown’s Slackin installation to Heroku’s newest stack.

Easy enough — upgrading to Heroku’s newest stack is actually a one click process.

But then the problem appeared: the Heroku stack update would only happen on the next time the app was deployed, and the Slackin app was actually originally deployed using a ‘deploy to Heroku’ Button — which meant that the app wasn’t tied to a Github repository.

After Googling, digging through a couple Stack Overflow answers, and finding Franz Geffke’s blog post on the subject, I found a solution on my own I liked more:

1. Fork the Github repository that your ‘deploy to Heroku’ Button installed
2. Change the Deploy settings on the Heroku app to connect it to the forked Github repo
3. Manually deploy the Heroku app using the Deploy Branch button

With any luck, everything will just work and your Heroku app will be up to date! In my case, I had to change some Config Vars on the Heroku app since Slackin’s requirements changed. Either way, refer to your Heroku app’s logs if things aren’t working as expected.

Good luck!