InPlay Preamble

Building custom libraries, namely geos and proj, is a pain on Heroku. You only have access to compile tools during slug compilation, not at runtime, so it's hard to debug library compilation issues. So, we try not to upgrade these packages unless strictly necessary. While 3rd party package maintainers for these have existed, ex. https://github.com/cyberdelia/heroku-geo-buildpack (archived & no longer maintained), we've had issues when either they upgrade or we need to upgrade and they haven't.

So, this is our fork of a project that compiles these packages at slug compilation time, then makes them publically accessible for download. Although we could just let the app serve them for future deploys, for cost savings we then move the compiled binaries to rackspace. THEN our main inplay repo pulls those precompiled binaries to be available for linking by rgeo when the main repo slug gets compiled.

Sort of a rude goldberg machine, but hopefully it works better than other methods we've used.

Vesuvius, a Vulcan replacement

Build libraries on Heroku without pain.

Why Vesuvius?

Vulcan has been deprecated and GCC is only available at build time on heroku-16 stack.

Even with heroku run bash, compiling stuff on Heroku was painful, time consuming, and you needed a third-party cloud storage to move your compiled library in order to download it.

With Vesuvius, this is no longer the case. During the deploy, Vesuvius will run all scripts located in /scripts/libraries and will move output files to a public directory.

It comes with proj.4 and GEOS as examples.

Automatic Setup

Manual Setup

1. Clone the repo
2. Create a new Heroku application
3. Set your buildpack to Heroku's apt buildpack

heroku buildpacks:set https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-apt

4. Add Heroku's Ruby buildpack

heroku buildpacks:add heroku/ruby

Deploy and navigate to your application's root path.

Example script

All you need to do is create a bash script to compile your library and save it under the scripts/libraries folder.

This is an example for the GEOS library:

#!/bin/bash

LIBRARY_VERSION=3.9.0

curl -O http://download.osgeo.org/geos/geos-${LIBRARY_VERSION}.tar.bz2 \
  && tar -xjvf geos-${LIBRARY_VERSION}.tar.bz2 \
  && cd geos-${LIBRARY_VERSION} \
  && ./configure --prefix=${HEROKU_VENDOR_DIR} \
  && make && make install \
  && tar -C ${HEROKU_VENDOR_DIR} -czvf ${TARGET_DIR}/geos-${LIBRARY_VERSION}-heroku.tar.gz .

How to use the compiled libraries

Take a look at heroku-buildpack-vendorbinaries.

Authors

Geremia Taglialatela

• http://github.com/tagliala
• http://twitter.com/gtagliala