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Engineering

Evolving the Backend Storage for Platform Metrics

One of our most important goals at Heroku is to be boring. Don’t get us wrong, we certainly hope that you’re excited about the Heroku developer experience — as heavy users of Heroku ourselves, we certainly are! But, even more so, we hope that you don’t have to spend all that much time thinking about Heroku. We want you to be able to spend your time thinking about the awesome, mission-critical things you’re building with Heroku, rather than worrying about the security, reliability, or performance of the underlying infrastructure they run on. Keeping Heroku “boring” enough to be trusted with…

Build Well-Documented and Authenticated APIs in Node.js with Fastify

If you’re an API developer working with Node.js, then you’re probably familiar with Express. But have you tried out the Fastify framework to build with power, speed, and convenience? In this walkthrough, we build a full-featured, easy-to-consume API with Fastify. And we deploy it to the cloud with ease. We show you how to: Get started working with Fastify to build an API Implement API authentication by using a JSON web token (JWT) Use Fastify’s Swagger plugins to generate an OpenAPI specification Consume the OpenAPI specification with Postman, giving you an API client that can send requests seamlessly to your…

Improved Browser Testing on Heroku with Chrome

For developers and businesses offering a web-based product, automated browser testing is a critical tool to ensure continuous delivery of a reliable service. Developers write browser tests by scripting actions against a real browser, simulating real usage by navigating, selecting, and making assertions about web pages and their document elements. In this post, we introduce a new community buildpack that helps with automated browser testing. The new buildpack resolves installation reliability problems in the existing Chrome browser buildpacks for Heroku apps. Browser Testing on Heroku Developers can manually run browser tests on their machines to support writing and debugging tests.…

Building a GPT Backed by a Heroku-Deployed API

How to connect your GPT on OpenAI to a backend Node.js app Late in 2023, OpenAI introduced GPTs, a way for developers to build customized versions of ChatGPT that can bundle in specialized knowledge, follow preset instructions, or perform actions like reaching out to external APIs. As more and more businesses and individuals use ChatGPT, developers are racing to build powerful GPTs to ride the wave of ChatGPT adoption. Source If you’re thinking about diving into GPT development, we’ve got some good news: Building a powerful GPT mostly involves building an API that handles a few endpoints. And in this…

Working with ChatGPT Functions on Heroku

How to Build and Deploy a Node.js App That Uses OpenAI’s APIs Near the end of 2023, ChatGPT announced that it had 100M weekly users. That’s a massive base of users who want to take advantage of the convenience and power of intelligent question answering with natural language. With this level of popularity for ChatGPT, it’s no wonder that software developers are joining the ChatGPT app gold rush, building tools on top of OpenAI’s APIs. Building and deploying a GenAI-based app is quite easy to do—and we’re going to show you how! In this post, we walk through how to…

How to Use pgvector for Similarity Search on Heroku Postgres

Introducing pgvector for Heroku Postgres Over the past few weeks, we worked on adding pgvector as an extension on Heroku Postgres. We're excited to release this feature, and based on the feedback on our public roadmap, many of you are too. We want to share a bit more about how you can use it and how it may be helpful to you. All Standard-tier or higher databases running Postgres 15 now support the pgvector extension. You can get started by running CREATE EXTENSION vector; in a client session. Postgres 15 has been the default version on Heroku Postgres since March…

Router 2.0: The Road to Beta

Last month, Heroku announced the beta release of Router 2.0, the new Common Runtime router! As part of our commitment to infrastructure modernization, Heroku is making upgrades to the Common Runtime routing layer. The beta release of Router 2.0 is an important step along this journey. We’re excited to give you an inside look at all we’ve been doing to get here. In both the Common Runtime and Private Spaces, the Heroku router is responsible for serving requests to customers’ web dynos. In 2024, Router 2.0 will replace the existing Common Runtime router. We’re being transparent about this project so…

More Predictable Shared Dyno Performance

In this post, we’d like to share an example of the kind of behind-the-scenes work that the Heroku team does to continuously improve the platform based on customer feedback. The Heroku Common Runtime is one of the best parts of Heroku. It’s the modern embodiment of the principle of computing resource time-sharing pioneered by John McCarthy and later by UNIX, which evolved into the underpinnings of much of modern-day cloud computing. Because Common Runtime resources are safely shared between customers, we can offer dynos very efficiently, participate in the GitHub Student Program, and run the Heroku Open Source Credit Program.…

The Adventures of Rendezvous in Heroku’s New Architecture

This article was originally authored by Srinath Ananthakrishnan, an engineer on the Heroku Runtime Networking Team Summary This following story outlines a recent issue we saw with migrating one of our internal systems over to a new EC2 substrate and in the process breaking one of our customer’s use cases. We also outline how we went about discovering the root of the issue, how we fixed it, and how we enjoyed solving a complex problem that helped keep the Heroku customer experience as simple and straightforward as possible! History Heroku has been leveraging AWS and EC2 since the very early…

Building a Monorepo with Yarn 2

In true JavaScript fashion, there was no shortage of releases in the JavaScript ecosystem this year. This includes the Yarn project’s release of Yarn 2 with a compressed cache of JavaScript dependencies, including a Yarn binary to reference, that can be used for a zero-install deployment. Yarn is a package manager that also provides developers a project management toolset. Now, Yarn 2 is now officially supported by Heroku, and Heroku developers are able to take advantage of leveraging zero-installs during their Node.js builds. We’ll go over a popular use case for Yarn that is enhanced by Yarn 2: using workspaces…

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