Posts Tagged ‘heroku’

I’m pleased to announce the launch of my new course, Heroku for PHP. I love Heroku as a hosting platform, and there were no Udemy courses on how to use it with PHP. So, I’ve filled the gap. For a very reasonable $29.99.

You can check it out here, and that link will save you an additional $10, too.

If you want to use Apple Pay on your website, you need to serve a file from inside the .well-known directory. This is a nightmare.

For a start, you can’t create a directory called .well-known on Mac. So you have to find another solution. mod_rewrite to the rescue perhaps? You may be able to get this working, but I couldn’t. I just got a 403 permission denied on Heroku.

client denied by server configuration: /app/public/.well-known

So I decided to try Alias instead.

This was easy to configure on my localhost. I created a directory without the period and then used Alias to map it.

Alias "/.well-known" "/Users/me/Projects/ProjectName/well-known"

To configure it in Heroku, I created a custom Apache configuration file.

Alias "/.well-known" "${HEROKU_APP_DIR}/well-known"

And then configured my Procfile to load this.

web: vendor/bin/heroku-php-apache2 -C heroku-apache.conf public/

So far, so good. Except this didn’t work either because I had not given the directory permission in the Apache config. So I expanded my custom config file.

<Directory "${HEROKU_APP_DIR}/well-known">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>

This got it working. However, it took my homepage offline. It seems that when you include a custom Apache configuration file, it knocks out the standard DirectoryIndex that Heroku has. Or, there is something else really obviously wrong that I am missing. That’s entirely possible, but I haven’t spotted it yet.

And I did manage to fix it by adding in a new DirectoryIndex to my .htaccess file.

DirectoryIndex index.php

Finally, you have Heroku serving the directory correctly.

Recently I launched a new website, Rena Men. It is deployed onto the Heroku platform and does quite a bit of cool stuff, so I thought I would document what I have done here.

Code

It is implemented in PHP, using the Rauma framework. Rauma is a project I developed for Learn Finnish and subsequently open-sourced.

Rena Men is built in several modules. There is a website, a content management system (CMS) and an image server. Because they use common functionality like the entity classes, there is also a shared library which is brought in as a Composer dependency.

The website itself is fairly straight forward. Beyond the PHP, there is only the CSS, pre-processed with SASS, and a tiny amount of JavaScript loaded in with require. The CMS is a bit more complicated, using Babel to transpile the ES6 JavaScript, and styled up with Bootstrap.

Deployment

Each module is deployed onto the Heroku platform. This makes it really easy to do as I can roll out an update just using git push. The code itself is stored in a series of private repos on BitBucket, and the Heroku build process fetches them from there.

In the case of the CMS, it also uses the Node build pack to run a Bower install. Third-party additions such as Bootstrap are pulled in on-the-fly just like we do with Composer dependencies. Heroku does not have SSH key integration for Bitbucket (it does for Github) so I’m using a ready-only account with Basic HTTP auth access.

The database is provided by one of the Heroku app add-ons. The storage is provided by Amazon S3. Heroku is built in AWS, so that fits nicely. We store originals in the file system and then crop them on-demand using the image server.

Delivery

Because cropping images is expensive, the image server originally had a local file cache where it would store each crop. However, as Heroku has an ephemeral file system, you cannot write to it, so I had to turn that off in production.

Instead, we’re using the AWS CloudFront CDN. This was super easy to implement. I just created the settings in AWS, pointed CDN subdomain at AWS and it started working. Like other web proxies, it caches your content based on the headers you send it.