What's up at Heroku | Hacker News Reader

What's up at Heroku

blog.heroku.com

41 pointsph0rque12 comments

After seeing this post, I remembered that they gave me a beta account a while ago. With some source I already had, tied to another db on another host, I was able to get http://fuel.dustincurtis.com up and working on Heroku within about 10 minutes. And 5 of those minutes were spent fixing a bug that was my fault.

Heroku is really, really awesome. It automatically detects the hostnames for your db in database.yml and corrects them, loads the schema, and just makes everything work, all automatically. You don't need to make any changes at all. I am still kind of amazed at how easy that was.

I'm currently starting a project on App Engine because it's free, but I'd much rather work with Rails. The free version of Heroku still incurs EC2 costs, right?

Nope! I don't think so. The last time I tried creating an app. I didn't find any such stuff

Anyway I too would like to confirm this with those who've used their free platform to some good use (unlike be creating an app to display my name).

Me and a friend are planning to develop our app on Heroku. I surely don't want to use EC2 here. Coz Me and my friend are students and have no credit cards (and live in a place where credit cards are not liked so much. No idea why.) So we've to try and bootstrap our app with just our paypal money we made thru some projects. Hope their commercial payment methods includes Paypal.

No. I've got several Heroku apps going and none of them incur any costs what-so-ever. You can ask them to "bless" an app and they will give it more CPU. They might start charging for this based on this blog post.

Overall, Heroku is extremely nice to work with. Sometimes your app stops responding and you have to dig up one of the founder's e-mails (because the mailing list receives no response), but the technology is sound and the editor is wonderful. The Git integration is handy, and it's very easy to create new apps when you suddenly have an idea on a Sunday evening.

Damn! I guess now isn't exactly the time to ask for a beta invite.

If you don't have an invite, you can still sign up, you just have to wait a bit. See: http://heroku.com/beta

ditto, looks awesome. Just signed up. If any staff from Heroku are feeling generous ... peter [\at] omgponi.es

Never used heroku, save for creating an account and clicking around. You mention Git integration - do you know if it is compatible with a Pushr setup? (http://www.restafari.org/pushr-or-the-application-will-deplo...)

For us, we just commit & push to a deploy branch and that script does the rest for getting it live.

Oh and I've got another question - does heroku allow terminal access for the live instance(s). More specifically, I like having instant access to the mysql db on the live server.. for situations that I need to fix something asap.

"Sometimes your app stops responding and you have to dig up one of the founder's e-mails (because the mailing list receives no response), but the technology is sound and the editor is wonderful."

How can the technology be 'sound' if the app sometimes "stops responding" ?

This intermittent issue is an edge case affecting a very small percentage of apps, and has been eliminated in the new version to be released shortly.

Interesting to hear the mailing list was unhelpful; we try to respond to it as soon as we can. More importantly though, we are in the process of setting up a proper and reliable support channel, which will be launched very soon.

This really makes me want to learn Rails. I wish AppEngine were closer to Heroku, so I can have my python and eat it too.

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