Introduction to Heroku Buildpacks | Hacker News Reader

Introduction to Heroku Buildpacks

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31 pointszrail6 comments

Hi, author here. I'm not affiliated with Heroku, I'm just a big fan.

Yes, nice post. There is some neat stuff in Heroku like buildpacks, but they are also very specific to Heroku, which is a big downside. I really think it is a shame they didn't just use a standard packaging system like .deb to handle things. The server instances are already Ubuntu... it seems like a natural extension to just support setting up a list of .deb files to load into an instance and have it 'just work'.

I needed recent ImageMagick/Ghostscript binaries and I spent many hours trying to get Vulcan to work and finally gave up. It is a mess and not documented very well. Someone commented on your blog that they've moved to another system (anvil) to deal with compiling binaries. I can see why they did this... so much unplanned stuff was bolted onto Vulcan it finally just stopped working entirely. It ended up being easier to just write a shell script, but this certainly isn't as sexy as using Vulcan or just installing a source .deb. https://github.com/lookfirst/convert/wiki/Compile

ddollar seems like a very smart, but very busy guy. Relatively simple issues are getting dropped on the floor. https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs/issues/20 It would be nice if he got some more help from within Heroku.

Anyway, thanks for writing your tutorial... more documentation is always good.

Nice post, thanks for sharing. I often find myself gushing about Heroku as well.

Maybe someone here will know this - is there anything out there that lets one run a Heroku buildpack on a server you control? They seem like really elegant solutions to the problem of shipping around dependencies, and I'd like to be able to use them on my own hardware...

I wrote a system called Dokuen[1] that uses heroku-style buildpacks in a git-based workflow. It's unfortunately difficult to install. That said, buildpacks are just three shell scripts run in a certain order. I've actually written three quarters of a Capistrano recipe that deploys using a buildpack, but it's not at all publishable code.

[1]: https://github.com/peterkeen/dokuen

http://www.activestate.com/stackato

Isn't quite plug and play, but they do support it http://docs.stackato.com/deploy/buildpack.html

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