the future is in beta

Have you ever had to include a private gem into your rails application? I’ve read about some alternatives like Gemfury, but a found pretty easy solution, instead of using your gem, include it as a git submodule in your Heroku application.

Be careful!! This is not the most secure way. We’ll use our private GitHub OAuth token.

First, we have to create our GitHub token using a HTTP request:

$ curl -u <github_username> -d '{"scopes": ["repo"], "note": "generate token"}' https://api.github.com/authorizations
Enter host password for user '<github_username>':

That will output a body like this:

{
  "id": 9879871,
  "url": "https://api.github.com/authorizations/9879871",
  "app": {
    "name": "generate token (API)",
    "url": "http://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#oauth-authorizations-api",
    "client_id": "jdksauc98s932849euw"
  },
  "token": "78fdf6s7d6g7fd6g7df6g7df6g7df6g7df",
  "note": "generate token",
  "note_url": null,
  "created_at": "2013-07-10T12:12:11Z",
  "updated_at": "2013-07-10T12:12:11Z",
  "scopes": [
    "repo"
  ]
}

We can use this 78fdf6s7d6g7fd6g7df6g7df6g7df6g7df to add the git submodule:

$ git submodule add https://78fdf6s7d6g7fd6g7df6g7df6g7df6g7df:x-oauth-basic@github.com/<github_username>/my-library.git lib/my-library

Next time you push your application to Heroku, it’ll pull the git submodule using the token to access your private repository.

This can be also done using your username and password instead of the OAuth token.