Heroku Blog

In December, we rolled out the public beta of a sweet new logging system for Heroku . The new system combines log output from your app’s processes and Heroku’s system components (such as the HTTP router). With all of your logs collated into a single, time-ordered stream, you get an integrated view of everything happening in your app.

Here’s a sample:

$ heroku logs
2010-10-21T14:11:16-07:00 app[web.2]: Processing PostController#list (for 208.16.84.131 at 2010-10-21 14:11:16) [GET]
2010-10-21T14:11:16-07:00 app[web.2]: Rendering template within layouts/application
2010-10-21T14:11:16-07:00 app[web.2]: Rendering post/list
2010-10-21T14:11:16-07:00 app[web.2]: Rendered includes/_header (0.1ms)
2010-10-21T14:11:16-07:00 app[web.2]: Completed in 150ms (View: 27, DB: 121) | 200 OK…

The improved maintenance mode we described last month is now standard for all existing and new apps.

This new maintenance mode is faster and much more scalable, particularly for apps with more than fifty dynos. It handles maintenance mode at the HTTP router, providing an instantaneous response for turning maintenance mode on or off regardless of the size of your app.

It uses a standard page which serves with an HTTP 503 code.

(If you preferred the old maintenance mode, you can manually add it to your app by installing this middleware and setting a…

When your app is crashed, out of resources, or misbehaving in some other way, Heroku serves error pages to describe the problem. We also have a single page for platform errors, once known as the ouchie guy (pictured right).

While the approach of showing error information directly via the web has worked well enough, there was room for improvement on both developer visibility and professionalism of presentation to end users. With that in mind, we’ve reworked our approach on error handling, making improvements that should make it much easier for you, the developer, to…

At Heroku, we believe PostgreSQL offers the best mix of
powerful features, data integrity, speed, standards compliance, and
open-source code of any SQL database on the planet. That’s why we
were so excited to see the new release of PostgreSQL, version 9.0.1.

The release is described as “the most anticipated PostgreSQL version in five years” for good reason. The release adds over 200 new features and improvements . For more on PostgreSQL 9, see the coverage in Infoworld , and Linux.com as well as the discussion on Hacker News .

Today we are making PostgreSQL 9…

Access to application logs on Heroku has historically been one of the least usable functions of the platform. The “heroku logs” command was nothing more than a broadcast fetch of the logfiles for every web and worker dyno in your app. This worked ok for small apps, but the user experience became very poor once you got past five or ten dynos.

I’m incredibly excited to announce that today we’re rolling out the public beta of our new logging add-on. This is a whole new way of capturing and collating logs, based on a syslog routing…