Heroku Rocks!

In my recent perusal of hosted application hosters (HAH™) such as Google's AppEngine, I've come across Heroku but had not the chance to try it. Problem no more!

The opportunity arose as we transitioned a large server from our ranks. The machine hosted a free thumnail converter the ELC team wrote a while back. It is now in running well and in maintenance mode. I decided to give Heroku a try as an alternative hosting setup.

The site was in SVN, so the steps roughly were:

# Remove the .svn directories:
find . -name ".svn" -exec rm -rf \{\} \;
# Import into git follow from... http://heroku.com/docs/api/
git init
git add .
git commit -m "init"
heroku create elc-thumbnails-deploy
git remote add heroku git@heroku.com: elc-thumbnails-deploy.git
git push -f heroku

This alone was 95% of the work. The next steps polished things off--added two gems to the deploy that were not in the heroku list... agh! Just searching I realize I missed a beautiful part of the Heroku system--their gems and plugins manager. Anyway--finally, I created a config/heroku.yml file to remove the branding from the application. Along the way I had the pleasure of interacting with the Heroku team. I think they've got great prospects ahead and I look forward to seeing their growth as they come out of beta.