Collaborating with Other Developers on Your App

Last updated 09 October 2019

This article shows app owners how to share their app with collaborators.

Collaborator permissions for apps in an Online or Enterprise Team

Collaborators are team members with a “collaborator” permission. They can perform any action that an owner can, if they have the right app permissions. As an example, a user with the “collaborator” permission in an Enterprise Team can only delete an app if they have “manage” permission on that application.

For Heroku Teams using Heroku Enterprise, please visit the App permissions article to learn more about app permissions and capabilities. For other Heroku Team accounts, please see the Heroku Teams article section that talks about managing permissions.

Collaborator permissions for apps in a personal account

Collaborators added to apps under personal accounts can perform any action that an owner can, except collaborators can not:

• Add or remove paid add-ons
• Delete, transfer or rename the app
• View invoices

Add collaborators

Other developers can be invited to collaborate on your app by their email address.

$ heroku access:add joe@example.com
Adding joe@example.com to myapp collaborators... done

To use the dashboard to add a collaborator:

1. Select the app in the dashboard.
2. Click the Access tab.
3. Click the Add collaborator button.
4. In the New collaborator window, type their email address.
5. Click Save changes.

When you invite a collaborator, an email is sent to let them know they were granted access to the app. If no existing Heroku account matches the email specified, an invitation email is sent.

View collaborators

Use the heroku access command to see the list of current collaborators:

$ heroku access
=== theirapp Collaborators
adam@example.com owner
joe@example.com  collaborator

Remove collaborators

You can revoke a collaborator’s access using the heroku access:remove command:

$ heroku access:remove joe@example.com
Removing joe@example.com from theirapp collaborators... done

To use the dashboard to remove a collaborator:

1. Select the app in the dashboard.
2. Click the Access tab.
3. Click the x beside the collaborator’s email address.
4. Click Delete Collaborator.

Once access has been revoked, the user is no longer able to deploy changes or modify the app’s configuration.

Merging code changes

When you’re collaborating with other developers, you might be prevented from pushing to the repo and see a message like this:

$ git push heroku
error: remote 'refs/heads/master' is not a strict subset of local ref 'refs/heads/master'.
maybe you are not up-to-date and need to pull first?

This means that other developers have pushed up changes that you need to pull down and merge with your local repository. The easiest way to do this is to run git pull --rebase. Ensure your changes don’t conflict with what you pulled down before deploying.