Journal of heroku investigations. Most recent entries on top? See also Heroku Consideration

Tuesday Oct 6

For future: Asset delivery

Needs to be investigated, heroku recommends CDN, we hadn’t accounted for that in cost or complexity of setup. https://github.com/sciencehistory/scihist_digicoll/issues/874

For future: Production vs Staging

While heroku has ways of creating production and staging environments, we aren’t going to worry about that for now, just working on getting a demo app up with a limited staging-like environment, following piece-by-piece plan from Monday.

For future: backups

Heroku postgres has it’s own built-in backups, including ability to easily rollback to previous point in time. Do we still want to do our own backups of postgres? Probably! But we should wrap our head the heroku backups and how they relate to ours, and update our documentation. https://github.com/sciencehistory/scihist_digicoll/issues/876

Software/configuration steps done

By “heroku dashboard” I mean the web GUI.

1. Install heroku CLI on my Mac

2. Create scihist-digicoll app in heroku dashboard

3. Provision heroku postgresadd-on. For now we’re going to do a hobby-basic at $9/month, although this won’t be enough for production, we plan a standard-0 at $50/month eventually. https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql

4. Import database from our staging instance to our heroku db (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-import-export)

   1. Do a new export on staging, since heroku asks for a certain format

      1. Tricky cause pg_dump doesn’t live on staging jobs server! Hmm, how do we do backups.

Mon Oct 5

Heroku has a LOT of docs, usually well-written. It is pretty well googled. Some heroku overview and getting started docs:

...

1. Get app deployed to heroku with postgres small web dyno only – no bg jobs yet, no solr yet. (Solr functions won’t work!)

2. Add in bg jobs – including heroku buildpacks with all the software they need (vips, imagemagick, ffmpeg, egc).

3. Add in solr – not sure whether to start by trying to have it connect to existing staging solr (which would require a heroku add-on for a static outgoing IP via SOCKS, so we could let it through our solr firewall, and/or other solr changed config), OR move right away to a SaaS solr – which would cost money, have to identify which one we need.

4. App substantially working at this point, but still lots of little pieces to get in place, such as nightly jobs, and various problem cases (out of memory for PDF generation etc).

For future: Infrastructure as code?

Deploying to Heroku involves configuring some things on the platform. For instance what I know about now includes mainly a list of config variables (such as what we have in our local_env.yml), and add-ons selected and their configuration.

...

• https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/using-terraform-with-heroku

• https://medium.com/rackbrains/manage-heroku-infrastructure-with-terraform-4a167b850300

https://github.com/sciencehistory/scihist_digicoll/issues/875