Build, test and deploy a Go application to Heroku | Hacker News Reader

Build, test and deploy a Go application to Heroku

blog.wercker.com

If you're like me and make golang apps with private packages on GitHub, you're going to have a bad time deploying to Heroku.

This is because the heroku buildpack for go has to `go get github.com/user/private-repo` the necessary packages. Public repos work fine for this, but private repos need credentials. There's a few reasons this isn't easy on Heroku.

I ended up working around it[1] but am still not happy with the security implications.

[1] https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-go/issues/17#issuecom...

This is an interesting scenario. I've resolved this by running the entire build pipeline on wercker and only deploy the binary on Heroku by using the null buildpack. I'll write up a post on this in the coming days.

btw you can find the Heroku null buildpack to launch binaries on Heroku here:

https://github.com/ryandotsmith/null-buildpack

I've been using wercker to test and auto deploy a few sideproject go apps and the process has been really smooth. I'm about to switch one over to their new ssh deploy stuff and will write a blog post about it.

Using them as a plain CI/badge system for libraries is really nice too: I'm using them on https://github.com/joho/godotenv for that and have been really happy with that.

Two thumbs up from me for the service all round.

I just finished up configuring one of my apps with their ssh deploy step. The whole process of defining build and deploy on green steps makes their service easy and worthwhile. I'm excited to see what they have in store for the future.

To add, Wercker's customer service is pretty awesome as well. One of their guys forked my app and submitted the necessary changes to get it to properly build when I was unable to do so myself. I think this dedication towards making sure the customers enjoy their service is going to help build their customer base.

How does wercker compare to Ansible or Chef?

Btw, great work on Goodfilms.

Ansible and Chef are tools that provision your servers. Wercker is a continuous delivery platform that tests, builds and deploys your applications. All of this packaged in an easy to use interface where you can also collaborate with others.

You can leverage tools such as Ansible, Puppet and Chef on wercker to create the environment (a wercker box) that mimics your production system, again to build, test and deploy your app, keeping dev/prod parity in true 12factor fashion:

http://12factor.net/dev-prod-parity

We've written up a post on provisioning wercker boxes which you can deploy to the wercker directory (http://app.wercker.com/#explore) here:

http://blog.wercker.com/2013/08/21/Overview-of-provisioning-...

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

cheers

I also spiked leveraging caching on wercker to improve build time: http://born2code.net/blog/2013/07/26/improving-Go-build-time...

I'm starting to really wish that Heroku was just another Docker PaaS, so that I could take all the Docker containers I've already made and deploy them there, or vice-versa. I wonder if it'll ever happen?

Hi I'm the cofounder of wercker. As you say, Heroku doesn't support Docker, but we're looking into deploying docker containers from wercker to any other IaaS with the push of a button. Feel free to email mies[at]wercker[dot]com if you want to beta test our new docker deployment capabilities.

What was the actual go app doing in the example? was it a web app?

It's a small example web application (API) that returns some JSON. The app also comes along with a unit test.

This is one article that is going to be referenced for years to come. I like the snowball-effect traction of 'how to deploy an X app on Heroku'.

also check out this post on doing code coverage with gocov for your golang apps:

http://blog.wercker.com/2013/08/05/checking-code-coverage-wi...

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