Your new best friend for isolated testing environments on Heroku

Fourchette is your new best friend for having isolated testing environements. It will help you test your GitHub PRs against a fork of one your Heroku apps. You will have one Heroku app per PR now. Isn't that amazing? It will make testing way easier and you won't have the (maybe) broken code from other PRs on staging but only the code that requires testing.

IMPORTANT: Please note that forking your Heroku app means it will copy the same addon plans and that you will pay for multiple apps and their addons. Watch out!

• a PR is created against your GitHub project
• Fourchette receives an event via GitHub Hooks
  • it forks an environement making it available to you
  • any new commit against that PR will update the code
• closing the PR will delete the forked app
• re-opening the PR will re-create a fork

Seriously? You need a diagram for that? Nope. Not going to do this. PRs accepted...I guess.

• single project
• configuration is made via environement variables
• async processing
• it works, but that's about it for now

Those steps could be made way easier, but this is a really minimal implementation.

If you want to see a sample app using fourchette, head this way.

1. Add gem 'fourchette' to your Gemfile
2. Run bundle install
3. Add require 'fourchette/rake_tasks' to your Rakefile
4. Create a Procfile and a config.ru (using the ones from this repo as example)
5. push to Heroku
6. configure the right environement variables (see #configuration)
7. Enable your Fourchette instance

• export FOURCHETTE_GITHUB_PROJECT="jipiboily/fourchette"
• export FOURCHETTE_GITHUB_USERNAME="jipiboily"
• export FOURCHETTE_GITHUB_PERSONAL_TOKEN='a token here...' # You can create one here: https://github.com/settings/applications
• export FOURCHETTE_HEROKU_USERNAME='me@domain'
• export FOURCHETTE_HEROKU_API_KEY='API key here'
• export FOURCHETTE_HEROKU_APP_TO_FORK='the name of the app to fork from'
• export FOURCHETTE_APP_URL="http://fourchette-app.herokuapp.com"
• export FOURCHETTE_HEROKU_APP_PREFIX="fourchette" # This is basically to namespace your forks. In that example, they would be named "fourchette-pr-1234" where "1234" is the PR number. Beware, the name can't be more than 30 characters total! It will be changed to be lowercase only, so you should probably just use lowercase characters anyways.

IMPORTANT: the GitHub user needs to be an admin of the repo to be able to add, enable or disable the web hook used by Fourchette. You could create it by hand if you prefer.

run bundle exec rake fourchette:enable

bundle exec rake -T will tell you the rake tasks available. There are tasks to enable, disable or delete the GitHub hook to your Fourchette instance. There is also one to update the hook. That last one is mostly for development, if your local tunnel URl changed and you want to update the hook's URL.

You need to run steps before and/or after the creation of your new Heroku app? Let's say you want to run mirgations after deploying new code. There is a simple (and primitive) way of doing it. It might not be perfect but can work until there is a cleaner and more flexible way of doing so, if required.

Create a file in your project to override the Fourchette::Callbacks class and include it after Fourchette.

You just want to override the before or after methods of Fourchette::Callbacks (lib/fourchette/callbacks.rb) to suit your needs. In those methods, you have access to GitHub's hook data via the @param instance variable.

rake fourchette:console  # Brings up a REPL with the code loaded
rake fourchette:delete   # This deletes the Fourchette hook
rake fourchette:disable  # This disables Fourchette hook
rake fourchette:enable   # This enables Fourchette hook
rake fourchette:update   # This updates the Fourchette hook with the current URL of the app

Fourchette uses Sucker Punch, "a single-process Ruby asynchronous processing library". No need for redis or extra processes. It also mean it can run for free on Heroku, if this is what you want.

• fork & clone
• bundle install
• foreman start
• You now have the app running on port 9292

Bonus: if you need a tunnel to your local dev machine to work with GitHub hooks, you might want to look at https://ngrok.com/.

If you want the maximum output in your GitHub comments, set this environment variable:

export DEBUG='true'

What needs to be improved?

• currently, it is assuming everything goes well, very little to no error management. This needs to improved.
• make it simpler to bootstrap a Fourchette app (possibily a rake task to generate the required files and callback overrides)
• it is not serious until there are specs for it, so add specs for that once we have a solid direction
• security improvements (we should not accept hooks from anyone else than GitHub)
• oAuth instead of GitHub token?
• multi project would be great

Thanks to @jpsirois for the logo!