Heroku Cookbook

Heroku Cookbook

By : Mike Coutermarsh

Buy this Book

Heroku Cookbook

By: Mike Coutermarsh

Buy this Book

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.

Heroku Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Installing the Heroku Toolbelt

Heroku applications are created and administered from the command line. To get started with Heroku, we need to install the Heroku Toolbelt. It contains everything we need to create and deploy new applications.

The toolbelt is an installer for three command-line tools:

Heroku Command Line Interface (CLI): This is an interface to the Heroku Platform API
Git: This is used for version control and to deploy our applications
Foreman: This is a tool to run Procfile-based applications

In this recipe, we will install the Heroku Toolbelt, making sure our machine is set up to use the Heroku CLI. We'll also be briefly introduced to the Heroku CLI. We'll learn about Git and Foreman later in the chapter.

Note

If you already have the Heroku Toolbelt, it might be beneficial to go through the following steps again to ensure that the latest version is installed.

Getting ready

First, we need to create a Heroku account with the following steps:

Let's go to www.heroku.com and create an account if we do not already have one.
Note
Remember to use a strong and unique password for Heroku. This account will be able to access our source code and data, so treat it like any other sensitive set of credentials.
Next, let's install the Heroku Toolbelt. Specific download and installation instructions are available at https://toolbelt.heroku.com/ for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Note
Throughout this book, we will be using a $ sign to indicate that a command should be run in a terminal. The $ sign is not part of the command.
Once the Heroku Toolbelt is installed, we can verify that everything is working by opening up a terminal and running the following command:
```
$ heroku --version
heroku-toolbelt/3.11.1 (x86_64-darwin10.8.0) ruby/1.9.3
```
We should see the version of the Heroku Toolbelt we are using printed to the console.

How to do it...

Now that we have the Heroku Toolbelt installed, let's log in to our account via the CLI and authorize our computer by uploading our public key using the following steps:

Let's log in by opening up a terminal and running the following command:
```
$ heroku login
Username: [email protected]
Password (typing will be hidden):
Could not find an existing public key.Would you like to generate one? [Yn]Generating new SSH public key.Uploading ssh public key /Users/mc/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
```
If we do not have an existing public key, the Heroku CLI will provide us with instructions on how to create one here. This key will be uploaded to Heroku's servers and used for authentication whenever we push new code to our applications.
Note
We'll need to repeat this step for any other computers we use Heroku from.
We can ensure that we are authenticated with the auth:whoami command. If logged in successfully, it will print our e-mail address:
```
$ heroku auth:whoami
[email protected]
```
Finally, we should go to the Heroku dashboard and verify our account by adding a credit card. Having a verified account will allow us to scale our applications and install add-ons (https://dashboard.heroku.com/account).

How it works…

The Heroku Toolbelt installs all the necessary tools to create and administer our Heroku applications. It's essential for us to become comfortable with Heroku's command-line tools. Even though many tasks can be completed on Heroku's website, not everything is available through the dashboard. For full control over our applications, we have to use the CLI.

Authentication

Ever wondered how Heroku keeps us logged in to the CLI? During the login process, Heroku stores an API key for our account in our .netrc file. The .netrc file is a dotfile that lives in our home directory. It's a common file that applications use to store credentials to log in to remote hosts. The API key stored in this file is used for subsequent logins and keeps us logged in to our Heroku account. If we open our .netrc file, we'll see an entry for api.heroku.com. If we ever run the auth:logout command, it deletes the entry from our .netrc file, thus logging us out.

Note

We do not need to worry about updating Heroku Toolbelt; it will automatically check for updates for us.

Heroku Cookbook

By : Mike Coutermarsh

Heroku Cookbook

By: Mike Coutermarsh

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Heroku Cookbook

Installing the Heroku Toolbelt

Note

Getting ready

Note

Note

How to do it...

Note

How it works…

Authentication

Note

See also