Since my employer, Improving lined me up a new gig that uses Entity Framework Code First, I thought I kick off a learning side project with MVC3 and deploy it to AppHarbor. Everything seemed simple enough. Use Nuget to install the code first bits, hammer out a couple of model and a datacontext and BOOM! data goes into a database.

It wasn’t anything pretty, but I was ready to deploy it to AppHarbor. That sounded great, but my first deploy failed. The local build compiled and worked as expected. The source that I pushed to AppHarbor compiled without problem, but the deployment failed.

Problem number one, I didn’t create a database on AppHarbor. The quick solution was to configure the database on AppHarbor following their instructions. My local compile was fine and I expected my deployment to work as well. Wrong.

After a bit of googling, I found a reference to this EF Tables only Nuget package. From the package writeup:

Adds a IDatabaseInitializer implementation for EF Code First CTP5, as a workaround for
situations where you need to update the tables,
but can’t recreate the database. Works with AppHabor.
To use simply set the DontDropDbJustCreateTablesIfModelChanged class as
IDatabaseInitializer with DbDatabase.SetInitializer.

This package put a code file into the application’s App_Start folder. By un-commenting this line:

Database.SetInitializer( new DontDropDbJustCreateTablesIfModelChanged<MyContext>());

So, after following some clear instructions to configure my connection string with the AppHarbor standards and using this NuGet package, I now have my first MVC3 application successfully deployed to AppHarbor! Hopefully this will help others, but I’m happy just to have this information in a place where I’ll be able to find it again.

Now to tweak, prune and watch it grow into something that is emblematic of my learning.