Radiant CMS in 5 Minutes Or Less

Radiant is an excellent Rails-based Content Management System (CMS). It was created by John W. Long and Sean Cribbs, and has been around for a couple of years, growing steadily in popularity. With the recent addition of taps and gem manifests, it’s super-easy to get this lightweight CMS up and running on Heroku.

Start by installing the latest radiant gem on your local box:

$ sudo gem install radiant

Now use the radiant command-line tool to set up your Radiant CMS locally. We’ll use SQLite as the local database:

$ radiant --database sqlite mycms
$ cd mycms
$ rake db:bootstrap

Before we can push to Heroku, we’ll need to initialize a git repo in our project directory:

$ git init

By default, Radiant caches CMS pages in RAILS_ROOT/cache. This won’t work with Heroku’s read-only file system, so before deploying we’ll change it to make sure cached files are written in the tmp directory. Open up your config/environment.rb, and change the cache config line so it reads:

config.action_controller.page_cache_directory = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/tmp/cache"

We’ll also add a gem manifest to make sure the radiant gem is installed on Heroku when we push. Radiant depends on rSpec 1.2.2, so our .gems file should look like this:

rspec --version 1.2.2
radiant --version 0.7.1

Then commit your changes:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "changed cache dir and added gem manifest"

Now it’s time to create an app on Heroku and deploy this baby to it.

$ heroku create
Created http://vivid-fog-54.heroku.com/ | git@heroku.com:vivid-fog-54.git
Git remote heroku added
$ git push heroku master
....
-----> Heroku receiving push
-----> Rails app detected
       Compiled slug size is 5.4MB
-----> Launching.......... done
       App deployed to Heroku

Finally, we’ll transfer over our local database using taps:

$ heroku db:push
Auto-detected local database: sqlite://db/development.sqlite3
Sending schema
Sending data
9 tables, 57 records
schema_migrat: 100% |==================| Time: 00:00:00
config:        100% |==================| Time: 00:00:00
page_parts:    100% |==================| Time: 00:00:00
extension_met: 100% |==================| Time: 00:00:00
sessions:      100% |==================| Time: 00:00:00
pages:         100% |==================| Time: 00:00:00
snippets:      100% |==================| Time: 00:00:00
layouts:       100% |==================| Time: 00:00:00
users:         100% |==================| Time: 00:00:00
Sending indexes

And now our Radiant instance is live and ready to go!