Rails 3 and Heroku: automatically "rake db:migrate" on push?

Heroku now has the ability to handle this as part of their "release phase" feature.

You can add a process called release to your Procfile and that will be run during each and every deploy.

Rails >= 5 Example

release: bundle exec rails db:migrate

Rails < 5 example

release: bundle exec rake db:migrate

What about this simple command chaining solution:

git push heroku master && heroku run rake db:migrate

It will automatically run the migrate as soon as the first one finishes successfully. It's tipically 1-2 seconds delay or less.

Here is a rake task that wraps up everything into a one-liner (and also supports rollback):

https://gist.github.com/362873

You still might wind up deploying on top of your boss's demo, but at least you don't waste time typing between the git push and the rake db:migrate.