I'm somewhat new to maintaining separate production vs development builds of an app.
I want to have my current build deployed to heroku so i can easily get it in front of people for critique but I'd also like to run a local version as well so i can make changes and see them quickly on the fly.
With my app on heroku, everytime i make a change, I have to push to github then hit the deploy button. This takes a relatively long amount of time compared to just launching the app on localhost and just refreshing the browser page to see how the changes came out. This is fine if you have made a ton of changes and you know they all work as expected, but its horrible for trying incremental changes, as you can imagine.
I know this is sort of a newbie question, but how can I have the best of both worlds?
The only way to achieve something like this is with review apps.
Instead of doing a git push, you will need to enable GitHub Sync. You will be able to deploy either through the heroku dashboard, or automatically when a push is made to master.
Review apps will automatically create a test app and configure it, for each pull request.
Then, when you wish to do QA with other people, you just have to give them the address to that review app where the new code is deployed instead of the main one.