‘Cedar’ Articles at ☠ nofail

Custom Domain SSL

Once you have added your domain to heroku and delegated the the name-server lookup via CNAME, you need to provision a SSL addon that costs $20 per month. This is just for the addon, no batteries included! So you also need to buy a SSL-certificate from the authority of your choice.

This setup is unfortunately not working with my hosting provider domainFACTORY as they allow only subdomains to be aliased via CNAME, the root-domain is not configurable. So you can forward www.yourdomain.de but not yourdomain.de.

CloudFlare to the rescue

The CDN provider CloudFlare has free SSL support when using the Pro Plan that also costs $20. This is a bargain compared to the heroku SSL-plugin as CloudFlare has way more use-cases than just SSL.

Configuring the DNS on domainFACTORY is quite simple. Just go to Für Profis > Nameserver-Einstellungen in your admin setup and remove all the DNS entries. Add the CloudFlare name-server settings to the bottom:

DNS + SSL made simple!

I’m using Heroku mostly for playing around with latest technology and hosting free apps. Since Heroku changed their pricing model due to the introduction of the new process model some of my apps changed from free to paid, especially those that had some background jobs or nightly crons (I really did not get, why this happend).

Full Stack Background Processes

If you want to run a resque worker and a clockwork process within your web-app, this becomes a costly thing, even if those are just running some minor jobs in the night, because you need to pay for 2 additional dynos.
You could achieve this through defining multiple processes in your Procfile:

# Procfile
web: bundle exec rails server thin -p $PORT
worker: QUEUE=* bundle exec rake environment resque:work
clock: bundle exec clockwork app/clock.rb

heroku scale worker=1 clock=1

Sharing Addon Connections

As Heroku officially announced in their latest newsletter, it’s possible to share connections between multiple apps. In my case, this would be a connection to a redis key-value store, that is provided by Redistogo. It’s as simple as copying the environment configuration for the addon over to the second app:

heroku config | grep DATABASE_URL  --app sushi
=> DATABASE_URL   => postgres://lswlm...

heroku config:add DATABASE_URL=postgres://lswlm... --app sushi-analytics
=> Adding config vars: DATABASE_URL => postgres://lswlm...m/ldfoiusfsf
=> Restarting app... done, v74.

Going Freemium

So the solution for getting back to a free worker setup is combining 3 Heroku apps and a shared Redis connection through Redistogo:

heroku apps:create freemium-web --stack cedar --remote heroku
git push heroku master

heroku apps:create freemium-worker --stack cedar --remote worker
git push worker master

heroku apps:create freemium-clock --stack cedar --remote clock
git push clock master

heroku scale web=1 --app=freemium-web
heroku scale web=0 worker=1 --app=freemium-worker
heroku scale web=0 clock=1 --app=freemium-clock

heroku addons:add redistogo:nano --app=freemium-web

heroku config:add `heroku config -s --app=freemium-web|grep redis` --app=freemium-worker
heroku config:add `heroku config -s --app=freemium-web|grep redis` --app=freemium-clock

I created an example project running a Rails 3 application with a mounted Resque web, a Resque worker and a clock process with Clockwork.

Even simpler

If you are just looking for a simple solution of running a background process have a look at crony, a bootstrap project using rufus-scheduler.

Tag: Cedar

using domainFACTORY with heroku and SSL