Working with git remotes on Heroku

Generally, you will add a git remote for your Heroku app during the Heroku app creation process, i.e. heroku create. However, if you are working on an existing app and want to add git remotes to enable manual deploys, the following commands may be useful.

Adding a new remote

Add a remote for your Staging app and deploy

Note that on Heroku, you must always use master as the destination branch on the remote. If you want to deploy a different branch, you can use the syntax local_branch:destination_branch seen below (in this example, we push the local staging branch to the master branch on heroku.

$ git remote add staging https://git.heroku.com/staging-app.git
$ git push staging staging:master

In some cases, your local branch may be missing some commits that were already deployed to Heroku, resulting in an error. If you are very sure you want to proceed, add the --force (-f) flag.

$ git push staging staging:master -f

Add a remote for your Production app and deploy

By convention, the remote name "heroku" is typically used for the production application.

$ git remote add heroku https://git.heroku.com/app.git
$ git push heroku master

Add a remote via Heroku CLI

As @voke points out, you can alternatively use a Heroku CLI command to add your remote. However, it looks like this will always use the default remote name heroku for the remote. If you would like to use a different name for your remote, see the "Rename a remote" section below.

$ heroku git:remote -a staging-app

Edit: Thanks to @nruth for pointing out you can supply a remote name to this command with the -r flag.

$ heroku git:remote -a staging-app -r staging

Add a remote using the SSH protocol

As @Saworieza points out, all of the examples above use the https protocol for connecting to the remotes, but it is also possible to connect via ssh.

$ git remote add staging [email protected]:staging-app.git
$ git remote add heroku [email protected]:app.git

Other useful commands

List your git remotes

The -v is the flag for "verbose" and includes the remote URL in addition to the remote name.

$ git remote -v

Rename a remote

$ git remote rename heroku staging

Change a remote URL or protocol

If you have already created https remotes and want to switch them to use ssh, the following command can be used. This command can also be used to change the target URL without changing the protocol

$ git remote set-url staging [email protected]:staging-app.git
$ git remote set-url heroku https://git.heroku.com/production-app.git

Copser/heroku-remote.md