The chicagoboss-on-heroku from pellegrino

chicagoboss-on-heroku's Introduction

Running ChicagoBoss (erlang web framework) on Heroku

N.B. This process was an initial attempt and is subject to change :)

To create a new project from scratch:

Create a top level project directory. Add an empty ebin/ directory. (N.B. also create a dummy file to commit to git)

Create a new heroku instance:

$ git init
$ heroku create --stack cedar
$ heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=http://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-erlang.git

Add ChicagoBoss as git submodule (also repeat for cb_admin if required)

$ git submodule add https://github.com/evanmiller/ChicagoBoss.git ChicagoBoss

Create app

$ cd ChicagoBoss; make; make app PROJECT=myapp

Add Procfile, run.sh from this project - edit project name in run.sh

Edit myapp/init.sh - add the following sections: (running erl with the -sname param causes heroku startup to fail)

'start-standalone')
       # Start Boss in production mode with no -sname parameter
       echo "starting boss in production mode..."
       START=$(./rebar boss c=start_cmd|grep -v "==>"|perl -pe 's/-sname\s+\S+//')
       $START
       ;;

 'start-dev-standalone')
       # Start Boss in development mode
       START_DEV=$(./rebar boss c=start_dev_cmd|grep -v "==>"|perl -pe 's/-sname\s+\S+//')
       $START_DEV
       ;;

Edit myapp/boss.config change boss path line to:
```
{path, "../ChicagoBoss"},
```
change port line to:
```
{port, {env, "PORT"}},
```
N.B. above currently requires ChicagoBoss HEAD to work
Deploy!
```
$ git add .; git push heroku master
```

A few caveats:

This is based on using the heroku supplied erlang buildpack at: https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-erlang
A better solution would be to modify the buildpack to build CB at the compile stage (as opposed to the run stage)
As such, the above solution may crash at the first deploy due to the app not starting within 60secs. Run:
```
$ heroku logs -t
```
in a seperate window to keep an eye on the deployment/startup process.