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Engineering

Rolling the Heroku Redis Fleet

Over the past few weeks, Heroku proactively updated our entire Redis fleet with a version of Redis not vulnerable to CVE-2018-11218. This was an embargoed vulnerability, so we did this work without notifying our customers about the underlying cause. As always, our goal was to update all Heroku Redis instances well before the embargo expired.

As a Data Infrastructure Engineer at Heroku, I wanted to share how we manage large fleet operations such as …

Rails Asset Pipeline Directory Traversal Vulnerability (CVE-2018-3760)

All previously released versions of Sprockets, the software that powers the Rails asset pipeline, contain a directory traversal vulnerability. This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2018-3760.

How do I know if I'm affected?

Rails applications are vulnerable if they have this setting enabled in their application:

# config/environments/production.rb config.assets.compile = true # setting to true makes your app vulnerable

Note: The default value of this setting that ships with Rails in production.rb is …

Heroku CLI: Completing Autocomplete

The CLI Team at Heroku strives to create a CLI user experience that is intuitive and productive. We had “build CLI autocomplete” in the icebox of our roadmap for many years. But if we were going to ship it, it had to complement the existing CLI experience. This is challenging because the Heroku CLI is very dynamic: it comprises user installable plugins, and the data needed for completions is behind an API.

Recently, we spent …

Securing Dependencies for Rails 5.2 Active Storage

The Public Cloud Security (PCS) group at Salesforce partners very closely with Heroku engineering to review and advise on new product features across the platform, from infrastructure to applications. One of the most rewarding aspects about this partnership and working on this team for me is when we not only identify security concerns, but take an active role in building safe solutions.

Heroku recently announced support for Active Storage in Rails 5.2, which introduces the …

Modern Web Stack: Rails 5 API, ActiveAdmin, and Create React App on Heroku

How to blend a rock-solid CMS and API with the absolute best in front-end tooling, built as a single project and hosted seamlessly on Heroku.

Rails is an incredible framework, but modern web development has moved to the front-end, meaning sometimes you don’t need all the bulk of the asset pipeline and the templating system. In Rails 5 you can now create an API-only Rails app, meaning you can build your front-end however you like—using …

Rails 5.2 Active Storage: Previews, Poppler, and Solving Licensing Pitfalls

Rails 5.2 was just released last month with a major new feature: Active Storage. Active Storage provides file uploads and attachments for Active Record models with a variety of backing services (like AWS S3). While libraries like Paperclip exist to do similar work, this is the first time that such a feature has been shipped with Rails. At Heroku, we consider cloud storage a best practice, so we've ensured that it works on our platform. …

MJIT: A Method Based Just-in-time Compiler for Ruby

I sat down with some Ruby friends in Hiroshima last year to have a conversation about just-in-time compilation for Ruby, specifically the new MJIT method-based implementation. Those of you who are already familiar with JITs and how they work might want to skip directly to the interview, the rest of us are going to hang out for a minute and learn about how things presently work in Ruby, and what it is exactly that …

Ruby CVE-2017-17405: Vulnerability in Ruby’s FTP Implementation

At Heroku we consistently monitor vulnerability feeds for new issues. Once a new vulnerability drops, we jump into action to triage and determine how our platform and customers may be affected. Part of this process involves evaluating possible attack scenarios not included in the original vulnerability report. We also spend time looking for “adjacent” and similar bugs in other products. The following Ruby vulnerability was identified during this process.

Vulnerability Triage

A vulnerability, CVE-2017-8817, …

Deconstructing Monolithic Apps with SHIFT Commerce

Editor’s Note: One of the joys of building Heroku is hearing about the exciting applications our customers are crafting. SHIFT Commerce – a platform helping retailers optimize their e-commerce strategy – is a proud and active user of Heroku in building its technology stack. Today, we’re clearing the stage for Ryan Townsend, CTO of SHIFT, as he provides an overview of SHIFT’s journey into building microservices architecture with the support of Apache Kafka on Heroku.

Software architecture has been a continual debate since software first came into existence. The latest iteration of this long-running discussion is between monoliths and microservices – large self-contained applications vs multiple smaller applications integrated together – but an even bigger question lies under the surface of our architecture philosophy: why does this even matter?

A House of Cards: An Exploration of Security When Building Docker Containers

Containers, specifically Docker, are all the rage. Most DevOps setups feature Docker somewhere in the CI pipeline. This likely means that any build environment you look at, will be using a container solution such as Docker. These build environments need to take untrusted user-supplied code and execute it. It makes sense to try and securely containerize this to minimize risk.

In this post, we’re going to explore how a small misconfiguration in a build environment …

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