Hacker News Reader

Not sure if you have done this already but: If you rotate your database, redis and email provider passwords/tokens, the zombie process might still be running but will not have any effects any more.

View on HN

OP here: that’s a good idea that did come up to mind (specifically rotating the Redis queue credentials). I was just sure Heroku’s gonna take care of this shit by now.

BTW, I’m not 100% sure it’ll work: if Heroku updates that zombie dyno’s environment variables, it may still have access to the new credentials :/ (My Redis instance is also a Heroku add-on)

Rotate a token, but also mangle it and change to the correct one in code. eg: change database url from `postgres://` to `invalid://` and replace it in code.

> BTW, I’m not 100% sure it’ll work: if Heroku updates that zombie dyno’s environment variables, it may still have access to the new credentials :/ (My Redis instance is also a Heroku add-on)

If the configuration only read once during startup, the celery process won't use the new configuration unless it's restarted, right?

Heroku will automatically restart dynos if you change environment variables.

This is a really smart idea! If you can't kill the process, make it completely ineffective by making it's api calls fail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com