PikeFlows project renamed Culvert.

[ Posted by James Harton Tue, 04 Aug 2009 04:03:00 GMT ]

Mainly because I liked it better. GitHub project page.

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Hosting for creative projects

[ Posted by James Harton Mon, 18 May 2009 22:38:23 GMT ]

I've been spending a bit of time lately thinking about where to get our creative projects hosted. I hesitate to call projects like Flittr artistic, but they're definitely creative. I think of it as a toy. Currently Flittr is hosted on Marek's VM but since cheap VM's operate on low memory footprints and Marek has his own Mono projects to host I can't host any additional projects on his box, even with Passenger and Ruby Enterprise keeping the memory usage to a miminum.

Of course, given Marek's well documented love for Mono he has suggested we try using IronRuby, which I'm happy to give a go but not on the production system (and I don't have time at the moment to set up a development environment).

That's where Heroku comes in. Heroku is a cloud-based Ruby hosting service, from their site:

Heroku is a platform for instant deployment of Ruby/Rails web apps.

Heroku is a completely novel approach to deploying web applications. Forget about servers; the fundamental unit is the app. Use the Heroku client gem to create and manage apps from the command line. Then deploy your code with Git, and control the running app with the remote Ruby console and rake commands.

Sounds good. What's the catch? Well, for free you get 1 dyno and 5MB of storage. Which is great unless your app uses a lot of resources. Now Flittr uses relatively little CPU and RAM (well, as little as any Rails app can) but has a growing database (currently 68MB) because it stores the state of every Flittr ever sent to someone's browser for repeatability and stores basic image metadata because hitting Flickr for each image is a very costly operation. So, if you have a small Rails app then definitely look at Heroku first. What are your other options? We'll cover them in the next installment.

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Typo on Heroku

[ Posted by James Harton Sun, 17 May 2009 23:45:06 GMT ]

Somehow it's fitting that my first blog post here on Mashd should be about getting Typo to run on Heroku. I kept getting errors about conflicting gems. It seems that json-1.1.3 is bundled in vendor/gems by Typo when you run the installed. In order to fix it I had to do:

$ git rm -r vendor/gems/json-1.1.3
$ rm -rf vendor/gems/json-1.1.3
$ git commit -m "rm json gem from typo"
$ git push heroku master

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