I deployed a small Sinatra app last night to Heroku for the new KickoffLabs API.

Most of the Sinatra apps I have deployed in the past have been small prototypes and used the inline Sinatra app style.

However, in this case, I made the decision early on to use the Sinatra::Base class style since we plan on growing the API codebase (ie, we are going to keep it around for a long time).

Everything was working as expected locally, but once I deployed to Heroku none of the static files in the public directories were rendering properly (all were 404’ing).

It turns out that when you use the Sinatra::Base class style, you need to set the public directory explicitly like this:

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class KickoffAPI < Sinatra::Base
  set :public, 'public'
end

Now this makes a lot of sense since in hindsight, but took me longer than I would like to admit to figure out. Hopefully this post and a little Google foo will save others a couple of hours.