Book Image

Heroku Cookbook

By : Mike Coutermarsh
Book Image

Heroku Cookbook

By: Mike Coutermarsh

Overview of this book

Heroku is a Platform as a Service that enables developers to rapidly deploy and scale their web applications. Heroku is designed for developer happiness, freeing developers from doing system administrative tasks such as configuring servers and setting up load balancers. Developers are able to focus on what they do best, building web applications, while leaving the details of deployment and scaling to the experts at Heroku. This practical guide is packed with step-by-step solutions to problems faced by every production-level web application hosted on Heroku. You'll quickly get comfortable with managing your Heroku applications from the command line and then learn everything you need to know to deploy and administer production-level web applications.

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Heroku Cookbook
Mike Coutermarsh
Nov, 2014 | 232 pages
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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Heroku Cookbook
Heroku Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with Heroku
Getting Started with Heroku
Introduction
Installing the Heroku Toolbelt
Introducing version control with Git
Deploying a Rails application to Heroku
Deploying a Node.js application to Heroku
Introducing dynos, workers, and scaling
2
Managing Heroku from the Command Line
Managing Heroku from the Command Line
Introduction
Viewing application logs
Searching logs
Installing add-ons
Managing environment variables
Enabling the maintenance page
Managing releases and rolling back
Running one-off tasks and dynos
Managing SSH keys
Sharing and collaboration
Monitoring load average and memory usage
3
Setting Up a Staging Environment
Setting Up a Staging Environment
Introduction
Duplicating an existing application
Managing git remotes
Password protection for a Rails app
Deploying with Heroku labs – Pipeline
Deploying from tags
Continuous integration and deployment with Travis CI
4
Production-ready with Heroku
Production-ready with Heroku
Introduction
Managing domains from the command line
Configuring DNS with CloudFlare
Setting up SSL with CloudFlare
Enabling preboot for seamless deploys
Enabling custom maintenance and error pages
Setting up a status page
Setting up log draining with LogEntries
5
Error Monitoring and Logging Tools
Error Monitoring and Logging Tools
Introduction
Checking Heroku's status
Adjusting Rails's logging level
Storing historical logs with PaperTrail
Monitoring for 404 and 500 errors with PaperTrail
Logging slow queries with PaperTrail
Monitoring uptime with Pingdom
Logging errors with Rollbar
6
Load Testing a Heroku Application
Load Testing a Heroku Application
Introduction
Monitoring dyno performance with Librato
Monitoring application performance with New Relic
Learning to load test with Siege
Configuring complex load tests with Siege
Load testing from the cloud with Blitz.io
Testing real-user scenarios with Load Impact
7
Optimizing Ruby Server Performance on Heroku
Optimizing Ruby Server Performance on Heroku
Introduction
Setting up and running Unicorn on Heroku
Monitoring and tuning Unicorn's memory usage
Tuning Unicorn's backlog for Heroku
Timing out long requests with Unicorn
Setting up and running Puma on Heroku
Running Puma with Rubinius for parallelism
8
Optimizing a Rails Application on Heroku
Optimizing a Rails Application on Heroku
Introduction
Setting up a sample blogging app
Using Heroku Deflater to gzip assets
Serving assets from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloudfront
Adding memcached to a Rails application
Adding Redis to a Rails application
Implementing low-level caching in Rails
Caching rendered views
Aborting long requests with Rack::Timeout
Using a follower for read-only DB queries
9
Using and Administrating Heroku Postgres
Using and Administrating Heroku Postgres
Introduction
Creating and sizing a new database
Promoting a Heroku database
Connecting to Heroku Postgres from Navicat
Connecting to Heroku Postgres from psql
Creating a database backup
Restoring from a backup
Creating a read-only follower
Viewing and stopping database processes
Analyzing Heroku Postgres's performance
10
The Heroku Platform API
The Heroku Platform API
Introduction
Making our first API request with HTTPie
Getting started with the Platform API gem
Scaling dynos and workers
Managing configuration variables
Adding and removing collaborators
Creating new Heroku applications
Index
Index

Enabling the maintenance page

Occasionally, we will need to make changes to our application that requires downtime. The proper way to do this is to put up a maintenance page that displays a friendly message and respond to all the incoming HTTP requests with a 503 Service Unavailable status.

Doing this will keep our users informed and also avoid any negative SEO effects. Search engines understand that when they receive a 503 response, they should come back later to recrawl the site. If we didn't use a maintenance page and our application returned a 404 or 500 error instead, it's possible that a search engine crawler might remove the page from their index.

How to do it...

Let's open up a terminal and navigate to one of our Heroku projects to begin with, using the following steps:

  1. We can view if our application's maintenance page is currently enabled with the maintenance command:

    $ heroku maintenance
  off

  2. Let's try turning it on. This will stop traffic from being routed to our dynos and show the...

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