Heroku Toolbelt

The original version of the Heroku command-line tool was available as a Ruby gem. This made it easy to install on all platforms with just one command: gem install heroku. While we love this simplicity, it depends on a system install of Rubygems. To get this experience on widely varying development environments, we created the Heroku Toolbelt, a one-click installer for every major platform.

Going forward we will be sunsetting support for the heroku gem in favor of the Toolbelt. If you're already using the Toolbelt, you're fine to stop reading now. To verify whether you're using the gem or Toolbelt, use heroku version:

$ heroku version heroku-toolbelt/2.32.11...

Bundler groups are commonly used to specify which dependencies of your application are needed in a given environment. You may have something like this in your Gemfile:

 group :test do gem "rspec" end

Using the "test" group in this case allows you to specify the gems that are needed to test your application.

Since you won’t need these gems in production, you can speed up installation by ignoring the "test" group. Bundler provides this ability through the --without option:

 bundle install --without test

You can currently access this functionality on Heroku by setting the BUNDLE_WITHOUT config var in your application.

Starting today we are going to default BUNDLE_WITHOUT to ...