[okfn-labs] Heroku as a deployment platform for OKFN apps?

Sun Aug 5 14:42:09 UTC 2012

Excerpts from Tom Oinn's message of 2012-08-05 13:59:20 +0000:
> We've been using Heroku to deploy Textus instances with quite a lot of
> success, chatting with Nick Stenning a while ago we pretty much agreed
> that this would be a good way to go in general for most OKFN
> applications, anyone else have experience / opinions on this?
> 
> Obviously not going to be so good for really big projects, but for
> something like Textus where we can go from nothing to a fully deployed
> app with its own elasticsearch instance in about five minutes it's
> rather cool. This is all using the no-cost service level (for both
> Heroku and the various addons we use), I suspect it gets expensive
> very quickly if you really need more capacity but the agility is great
> and being able to give people the ability to create their own versions
> of Textus that easily similarly so.
> 
> For reference the steps required to get a Textus instance running are
> as follows - you won't actually get much working at this exact moment
> in time as I'm re-skinning the entire site and a few things are broken
> but...
> 
> Firstly you need to install the heroku tools
> (https://toolbelt.heroku.com/) and git for your machine, create an
> account on Heroku and give it your credit card (it won't be charged,
> but even though we use the free tier of the addons the system won't
> let you install them without billing information). Then do:
> 
> ==========================================================
> $ git clone git://github.com/okfn/textus.git
>         Cloning into 'textus'...
>         remote: Counting objects: 962, done.
>         remote: Compressing objects: 100% (547/547), done.
>         Receiving objects: 100% (962/962), 652.19 KiB | 232 KiB/s, done.
>         Resolving deltas: 100% (542/542), done.
> $ cd textus
> $ heroku login
>         Enter your Heroku credentials.
>         Email: tom.oinn at okfn.org
>         Password (typing will be hidden):
>         Authentication successful.
> $ heroku create
>         Creating aqueous-cliffs-5696... done, stack is cedar
>         http://aqueous-cliffs-5696.herokuapp.com/ |
> git at heroku.com:aqueous-cliffs-5696.git
>         Git remote heroku added
> $ heroku rename mytextus
>         Renaming aqueous-cliffs-5696 to mytextus... done
>         http://mytextus.herokuapp.com/ | git at heroku.com:mytextus.git
>         Git remote heroku updated
> $ heroku addons:add bonsai
>         Adding bonsai on mytextus... done, v2 (free)
>         Use `heroku addons:docs bonsai` to view documentation.
> $ heroku addons:add mailgun:starter
>         Adding mailgun:starter on mytextus... done, v3 (free)
>         Use `heroku addons:docs mailgun:starter` to view documentation.
> $ git push heroku master
>         Counting objects: 962, done.
>         Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
>         Compressing objects: 100% (891/891), done.
>         Writing objects: 100% (962/962), 639.94 KiB | 45 KiB/s, done.
>         Total 962 (delta 541), reused 79 (delta 45)
>         -----> Heroku receiving push
>         -----> Node.js app detected
>         -----> Resolving engine versions
>                    Using Node.js version: 0.6.20
>                    Using npm version: 1.1.41
>         -----> Fetching Node.js binaries
>         -----> Vendoring node into slug
>         -----> Installing dependencies with npm
>                    npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/express
>                    npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/elastical
>                         ......
>                    Dependencies installed
>         -----> Discovering process types
>                    Procfile declares types -> web
>         -----> Compiled slug size is 4.7MB
>         -----> Launching... done, v5
>                    http://mytextus.herokuapp.com deployed to Heroku
>         To git at heroku.com:mytextus.git
>          * [new branch]      master -> master
> ==========================================================
> 
> If anyone has any horror stories I'd love to hear them, thus far it's
> been pretty much entirely painless.
> 

for PaaS solutions Platform-as-a-Service lately i came across this OPEN stack:
http://nodester.com/

i looks like node.js only but it seams that they share all their code, which one can't say about Heroku or Nodejitsu :(

cheers!