

Introduction to Heroku Buildpacks - zrail
http://bugsplat.info/2012-11-05-introduction-to-heroku-buildpacks.html

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zrail
Hi, author here. I'm not affiliated with Heroku, I'm just a big fan.

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latchkey
Yes, nice post. There is some neat stuff in Heroku like buildpacks, but they
are also very specific to Heroku, which is a big downside. I really think it
is a shame they didn't just use a standard packaging system like .deb to
handle things. The server instances are already Ubuntu... it seems like a
natural extension to just support setting up a list of .deb files to load into
an instance and have it 'just work'.

I needed recent ImageMagick/Ghostscript binaries and I spent many hours trying
to get Vulcan to work and finally gave up. It is a mess and not documented
very well. Someone commented on your blog that they've moved to another system
(anvil) to deal with compiling binaries. I can see why they did this... so
much unplanned stuff was bolted onto Vulcan it finally just stopped working
entirely. It ended up being easier to just write a shell script, but this
certainly isn't as sexy as using Vulcan or just installing a source .deb.
<https://github.com/lookfirst/convert/wiki/Compile>

ddollar seems like a very smart, but very busy guy. Relatively simple issues
are getting dropped on the floor. <https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-
nodejs/issues/20> It would be nice if he got some more help from within
Heroku.

Anyway, thanks for writing your tutorial... more documentation is always good.

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someone13
Maybe someone here will know this - is there anything out there that lets one
run a Heroku buildpack on a server you control? They seem like really elegant
solutions to the problem of shipping around dependencies, and I'd like to be
able to use them on my own hardware...

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zrail
I wrote a system called Dokuen[1] that uses heroku-style buildpacks in a git-
based workflow. It's unfortunately difficult to install. That said, buildpacks
are just three shell scripts run in a certain order. I've actually written
three quarters of a Capistrano recipe that deploys using a buildpack, but it's
not at all publishable code.

[1]: <https://github.com/peterkeen/dokuen>

