Behold: the Heroku gems/plugins manager.

This has been one of our most requested features to date, and we’re glad to finally get this released. Although you could manually upload plugins previously, this will make the process a lot smoother. (You can still manually manipulate the files in your vendor directory if you prefer.)

To get to the manager, open your vendor directory in the lefthand filenav, and click the link that appears at the top:

You can search by name, or browse the list of 2500+ gems and 1000+ plugins. Once you find what you’re looking for, click on Install in the righthand column to install it into your app. Click Remove to remove it if it’s no longer needed.

You can also upload your own plugin as a tarball or a .gem file. Just click the Upload link at the bottom. Once it’s installed, you’ll see it listed alongside your other installed gems and plugins, and you can remove it in the same way. (Though you’ll need to upload it again if you decide you want it back.)

The data for plugins comes from the Agile Web Development plugin directory. Thanks to Ben Curtis, the site’s author and maintainer, for adding some extra fields to the XML API for us. The data for gems comes from the relative newcomer Gemtacular.

Note that gems with binary dependencies are unlikely to work. If you’re trying to install a gem and it doesn’t work, email us and we’ll see what we can do. Additionally, there are quite a lot of gems that don’t make any sense in the context of Heroku – for example, the 3rd party ActiveRecord database adapters, or GUI toolkits like the GTK bindings. In iteration 2 of this component we hope to flag gems and plugins as Heroku-friendly or not.

We made the design decision to mix gems and plugins together in the same view. This will probably cause at least a few folks to protest “But gems and plugins are nothing alike!” Make no mistake, we know the difference quite well. In building the interface, however, it occurred to us that the process of managing them was very similar. And from a high-level point of view, they are two forks of the same tree: add-ons to extend or modify the behavior of the programming environment of your app.

Rails 2 is now the default for all newly created Heroku apps.

Existing apps will continue to run on 1.2 unless you edit config/environment.rb and change the version number manually. Importing an app will try to guess the Rails version from your environment.rb, but you should double-check after the import to make sure the version is set to what you wanted.

We’ll leave a 1.2 gem available for a while, but we’re going to take advantage of our beta status here and keep the time window on this relatively short – perhaps a month or two. (Don’t worry, by the time the next major Rails release goes around, we’ll have a plan for longer-term support of legacy versions in place.)

It’s quite painless to upgrade, especially if you don’t have any deprecation warnings in your logs. Here’s a list of the major features and changes, and here’s some notes to help you upgrade.

Sometimes, it’s the little things. A few niceties deployed recently:

• The code editor UI now has a liquid layout. If you’re a life hacking / GTD type like me, you’ll especially enjoy this in combination with Firefox’s fullscreen mode. (FF for OS X doesn’t have fullscreen, unfortunately; try this instead.)
• Download files from the context menu. You can use this in conjunction with upload to edit in your local editor, load an image into your photopaint program, etc.
• Speaking of images, if you click on an image, it will display it in the editor pane.
• There’s a link to update your account password on the My Apps page. (Shocked this wasn’t there before? We’re in beta, dammit, we’re allowed to slack off on stuff like this.)
• More bugfixes than you can shake a ticket-tracker at.

We’ve been working our tails off over the past few weeks to process all the feedback you guys have been sending (or that we’ve gleaned from the system logs). I think that this photo of the trashcan under Orion’s desk tells the story pretty well:

He bought that case of Rockstar at Costco last week, and consumed it all as part of our mad dash to squash bugs exposed by our sudden surge of users. Bad for Orion’s health, but good for Heroku’s backend stability. :)

One major area we’ve been dealing with in this past week is the issue of failed mongrel starts. That is, exceptions that occur while the Rails framework is booting, rather than on a page request. These sorts of exceptions often happen with imported apps, because certain types of plugins or gem dependencies may not work out of the box with Heroku yet, or you might just have some odd stuff in your environment.rb that isn’t compatible with the version of Rails we’re running.

Up until recently, this was producing an unhelpful HTTP 502 bad gateway page. Now, you’ll see the contents of your mongrel.log so that you can diagnose the issue.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a “Restart” button that existed for a few days. We’ve removed that in favor of automatically restarting whenever you save a file that needs a restart (like routes.rb or environment.rb). So far this seems to work pretty well – but as always, let us know if you find a case where it doesn’t work as expected.