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:

The Rails 2.3.2 gem is now installed and available for use on Heroku. To learn more about what’s new and improved, check the official Rails blog post.

Enjoy!

Gem installation and management has always been pain when the time comes to deploy an app. Rails 2.1 made good progress in this area with gem dependency specifications, allowing you to vendor required gems with a of set rake commands. That’s the method we’ve been recommending for Heroku apps until now, but it does leave important problems unsolved.

First, a substantial limitation of the vendoring method is that it only works with pure Ruby gems. Many apps depend on gems with native extensions that need to be compiled on the deployment target. It’s no good compiling a gem on your Mac laptop and trying to deploy the resulting binary to a Linux host.

Then there’s the...