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Developer Tools

Heroku Tour Dates: Creating with Heroku and Ruby

In our ongoing efforts to spread the Heroku word worldwide, our North American tour continues with a bunch of new venues coming up.

Each time we meet with people, we’re blown away with the new applications people are creating on Heroku. For example, last month FlightCaster launched an amazing app for predicting flight delays using Heroku, Clojure, S3, Hadoop and some general amazing tech. We’d love to hear from you on what you’re creating, …

And the winner is… Michael Ansel!

Congratulations to Michael who’s the winner of our Heroku+Twilio Developer contest. Michael got seriously busy, and submitted not one but two projects for the contest!

The first is a handy app that tells students, faculty, employees, and visitors at Duke University which places on campus are currently open. Simply call in, and it’ll read you back a list of open restaurants, libraries etc. There’s even a keypad-based search option. Seriously cool stuff! You can try …

Develop a Voice App With Twilio to Win a Netbook

Not too long ago building telephony apps, such as interactive voice response systems, was far out of reach for most web developers. Now, an exciting crop of new startups is rapidly changing that, making it easy to incorporate voice capabilities into any web app, or even build standalone voice apps.

Twilio is emerging as one the leading companies in this area, offering a a REST API for building voice apps.

The model is simple: sign …

We Talk Scalability and Speed on RailsLab | Heroku

Railslab is a great site by our friends over at New Relic that contains a wealth of knowledge on Rails scaling and application performance.

A couple of weeks ago they asked Ryan and Adam to stop by for a discussion of the vision behind Heroku, and the philosophy that drives the design and buildout of our scalable, provisionless hosting platform.

The interview is now available for your viewing pleasure in three parts. In the …

Fork Our Docs

Heroku is now sporting an updated docs layout at docs.heroku.com. These new docs should be much easier to navigate and link to.

We built this as a standalone Sinatra app serving Markdown files, partially inspired by Assaf Arkin’s approach to Buildr. This makes it as snappy as staticly rendered pages, while retaining the flexibility of a dynamic app on the backend.

The docs app is deployed as a regular app on Heroku (just like …

Radiant CMS in 5 Minutes Or Less

Radiant is an excellent Rails-based Content Management System (CMS). It was created by John W. Long and Sean Cribbs, and has been around for a couple of years, growing steadily in popularity. With the recent addition of taps and gem manifests, it’s super-easy to get this lightweight CMS up and running on Heroku.

Start by installing the latest radiant gem on your local box:

$ sudo gem install radiant

Now use the radiant command-line …

Rails 2.3 Is Now Available for Deployment on Heroku

The Rails 2.3.2 gem is now installed and available for use on Heroku. To learn more about what’s new and improved, check the official Rails blog post.

Enjoy!

Gem Manifests

Gem installation and management has always been pain when the time comes to deploy an app. Rails 2.1 made good progress in this area with gem dependency specifications, allowing you to vendor required gems with a of set rake commands. That’s the method we’ve been recommending for Heroku apps until now, but it does leave important problems unsolved.

First, a substantial limitation of the vendoring method is that it only works with pure Ruby gems. …

The Future of Deployment

Application deployment is changing. In relatively short order I’ve gone from buying hardware, to monthly hosting, to metered CPU time, and from building my open-source software manually, to package managers, to fancy config tools and recipes to pre-build whole machine images. What’s next?

The Old Way

I can deploy Rails apps in a traditional hosting environment pretty quickly. For a small app, I might make a new unix user and database on a personal Slicehost …

How-To: Use Heroku and Hoptoad for Collecting Exceptions

Hoptoad (now Airbrake) is a great service by Thoughtbot for collecting exceptions. Like exception_notifier, but without clogging your inbox, and much prettier.

Using Hoptoad with Heroku is a cinch. First, sign up for a free Hoptoad account.

Now install their notifier plugin. If you’re working locally and deploying to Heroku with Git, install with script/plugin:

script/plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/hoptoad_notifier.git

Or if you’re using the Heroku web editor, open the vendor folder and click Gems & …

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