Hey there ππΌ
Is there a case for building a guide to selfhost in Heroku for those who want to self host but without the overhead of deploying to AWS, Google etc?
Something simple that gets a Forem up and running on the hobby plan with the free PostGres tier and minimal config.
Thanks!
Lee
Top comments (12)
Here you go! It's been here all the time. If you wanna contact me, just ping me witin Forem or in Leewardslope.
Production: Forem on Heroku
Akhil Naidu γ» Jun 9 γ» 4 min read
Recently, I cleaned my Heroku account by removing few un-used demo projects. So you might not be able to view the demo link mentioned in the tutorial.
If you are facing errors during the installation process or want to have a deeper understanding of how things work over Heroku => you can ping me!
ah cool, missed this π looks like a lot has changed since I deployed prod into heroku. Is there no dependency on Cloudinary or Fastly now when you deploy?
If you don't want
Image CachingandImage Resizing(Which are very essential for a production app), you can stop using Cloudinary and Fastly; but you should use s3 bucket to store your images.This way, you will not face any issues with images. Also, rather than creating a bucket in your preferred region use the region of Heroku.
Gotcha, I actually run a prod instance on Heroku already that mirrors Dev. I am just interested in whatβs changed since then how much more streamlined it is on Heroku, it was pretty difficult 2 years ago!
I know π The practical dev repo made me a practical dev at that point of time.
π€£π€£
Fantastic learning experience though eh? I loved every minute of it π
Selfhost relies on Fedora CoreOS, and so you cannot host custom VM images on Heroku or any other Platform as a Service (PaaS) for that matter.
If they start supporting Heroku, they'll be then asked for AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Services, Google App Engine, Digital Ocean Apps.
Each PaaS has its own requirements, so now Forem has to maintain all these variants, and then there is the trouble of keeping your Forem in-sync or rolling back in case of issues. On a PaaS you get initial convenient of standing up the server, but future maintenance is fraught with nightmarish problems.
So I think unlikely we'll see support for PaaS, and honestly seeing their architecture in action, this kind of forces people to be in the best position to support their platform.
For people who need less friction, there needs to be a paid SaaS offering. Supporting PaaS is just a lose-lose situation in the long run.
Thanks for explaining the distinction here, @andrewbrown and @lee !
@akhil is right that there's a way to install Forem on Heroku, but you're both correct that it's a separate process from the self-host playbook.
As an aside, Forem also offers a SaaS option, called Forem Cloud. A few examples of Forem Cloud Forems can be found on Forem Discover (along with @lee 's OG self-hosted Heroku Forem π)
DEV runs on Heroku
Leewardslope runs on Dokku
In fact, I have created a working SAAS platform for premium Forem hosting using Heroku, but for now I've been thinking to migrating to my own Dedicated server.
I am talking about a selfhost βguideβ for Heroku, (updated title) totally get that the selfhost repo is vm/podman based π
I have been running a build in Heroku for nearly 2 years now that mirrors Dev, initially it was dependent on Fastly, Cloudinary and Algolia search but as we went through the generalisation process, these have almost been removed.
There is a SaaS offering. Using that at the moment too and itβs great but I still think there is defo a use case for a simple Heroku deploy straight from the Forem repo, itβs almost 99% supported already