

Deploy PHP Apps to Heroku, Simplified - ridruejo
http://blog.bitnami.org/2013/02/deploy-php-apps-to-heroku-easy-way.html

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bpatrianakos
This is cool, useful, and good news but there's a "but" coming. There are far
better options for PHP hosting than Heroku. Other technologies like Ruby,
Node, and Java require what less technical developers would consider "extra"
work and consideration. What I mean by that is that you can't just plop your
Rails or node or Django or Java app on a server, visit it in a browser, and
have it run. But PHP is different. Most PHP applications save for some very
complex ones only need PHP installed then developing and running them is
honestly as simple as creating static HTML pages.

So with that said, why use Heroku when you can use AppFog FortRabbit or, dare
I say, shared hosting for cheaper and with the same amount of convenience?

Don't get me wrong, the fact that they're supporting these stacks for PHP is
cool and I'm one of the minority that doesn't think PHP is going anywhere
soon. I'm sure it's a pretty great learning experience for some people to
deploy their PHP app on a service like Heroku - there's no doubt about the
value in that. I just wonder "why support PHP on Heroku"? I mean, if Heroku
one day made it impossible to run PHP apps I don't think many would miss it
and may make things easier on the Heroku guys. There's no shortage of
platforms that support PHP out there.

~~~
obviouslygreen
I'd imagine they believe the same thing you (and I) do: Opinions about it
aside, PHP isn't going anywhere. If nothing else, perhaps the target audience
is Heroku users who are for whatever reason using PHP instead of their usual
tech for a project. Or they're looking to edge into the FortRabbit market and
just haven't gotten there with the offering yet... I'd think there are plenty
of angles to work.

I'm also not sure about "PHP isn't going anywhere" being a minority opinion.
Even people who disparage it usually understand that its ubiquity, ease of
deployment, low learning curve, etc. mean it's unlikely to leave us alone any
time soon, if ever.

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KingMob
Having actually deployed a PHP project on Heroku, this would have been a
godsend at the time I started. While Heroku unofficially supports PHP (for
Facebook apps), their default PHP stack leaves a _lot_ to be desired. In
particular, lack of default zlib and multi-byte string support caused all
sorts of chaos.

I don't blame Heroku for this, since they don't officially support PHP, but it
was a PITA. Luckily, someone else had already encountered these issues, and I
was able to plunk in some pre-built libs.

I chose Heroku because I wanted to familiarize myself with the top PaaS
provider, but if I had to do it again, I would have bitten the bullet, learned
a new language, and not mentioned it to the client. Or, if I were forced to
use PHP, I'd have gone with a provider where it's a first-class citizen.

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apinstein
Does anyone know what this actually is? Is it just a local stack that delivers
requests to PHP in the same way that Heroku does? Or did they do a custom
buildpack?

I am not sure what "Heroku on your local machine" means...

I have a custom php buildpack that I made (forked from heroku, borrowed some
other ideas...) but to run it locally I just use PHP-FPM and there's nothing
more to it...

~~~
ridruejo
It is a local PHP environment that bundles the Heroku client libraries. If you
already have your own setup, it is not that big of a deal. For people
developing on Windows, for example, it can be tricky to even setup the minimal
Ruby environment to install Heroku libraries, etc. This is primarily targeted
to developers that already know PHP but are getting started with Heroku

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michaelbuckbee
I'm actually a fairly big fan of running Wordpress on Heroku. It works great
and it's very nice to have my Rails, Node and PHP apps all on the same PAAS.

I use the wordpress-heroku project [1] and it has been great.

1 - <https://github.com/mhoofman/wordpress-heroku>

~~~
ridruejo
Do you run into issues when some of the plugins require a shared, persistent
filesystem? I know you can redirect uploads to S3, etc. but some other plugins
expect a filesystem

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Yes, that is definitely an issue. On the flip side having Wordpress run on
Postgres and a Read only filesystem mitigates some security issues.

