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I tried installing spree the other day, a rails shopping app, and I gave up after entering gem dependency hell and the no local file policy. Went faster on my o

I tried installing spree the other day, a rails shopping app, and I gave up after entering gem dependency hell and the no local file policy. Went faster on my own server with nginx+passenger.

bgnm2000 17y ago
Exact same experience yesterday. Weird.
- bphogan 17y ago
  You will. Heroku has three big limitations that can make your app a no-go there. The first is only hourly cron tasks which means doing sweeping every 15 minutes is not possible. Not terrible, but sometimes a showstopper if you're trying to do background tasks frequently. The second is that it's a read-only filesystem which means you either don't use the filesystem for your work, or you use S3. S3 is great, but is another service you need to monitor and pay for. You also will need to employ other solutions to compress CSS, JS files, or to create a cache. Third, there's no shell. There's a console, like the Rails console, but you're not going to be setting things up yourself. Heroku is a heck of a platform. I run tons of stuff there, even on the free plans with no problems. However, the limitations can be showstoppers for you depending on 1. how much hackery you want to do and 2. if it's even possible.
  - andrewvc 17y ago
    If you need to perform background tasks more frequently you can always spawn a worker process. I find that the read only FS is a good thing, decoupling storage from app servers really helps wrt to scaling.
blasdel 17y ago
Though they just fucked it up in the betas by depending on rubygems-1.3.6, it's not so hard to get it running on Heroku. You run the rake tasks to copy the public directories from extensions to the root one locally before pushing, you pre-cache the generated CSS (not a problem in the betas, they eliminated sass), and setup asset image uploads to go to S3. The real problem with hosting Spree on Heroku is having to spend $100/m for an IP for SSL. The actual cost for setting up ELB instances to get extra IPs for SSL is $20/m. That's a problem when you want to set up a bunch of differently branded storefronts. It's the main reason why I'm doing DIY with http://github.com/wr0ngway/rubber/ http://github.com/wr0ngway/rubber/ instead of using Heroku for the spree project I'm working on right now.
- hopeless 17y ago
  The SSL thing is really annoying and expensive but I think there's sufficient demand/pressure that Heroku will find a better alternative... possibly with the help of Amazon.
  - jackowayed 17y ago
    They really need to. If the thing you're doing is important enough that you need SSL (and a custom domain), you have to be pretty big for SSL not to be prohibitively expensive. SSL alone is as expensive as a 1.5 GB slice from slicehost. I know it's not really their fault, but they need to work with amazon to get several IPs for each of their images, or something.
xal 17y ago
You cannot be PCI DSS compliant on Heroku unless you only use paypal express or google checkout for your payment backend. Be mindful of that before you commit to something like spree. I recommend Shopify instead :D
- grahamr 17y ago
  Is this accurate that paypal express and google checkout are the only legitimate ways to accept payments while deployed on Heroku?
- qeorge 17y ago
  This doesn't sound right to me. Do you perhaps mean PCI Level 1 compliance (which requires on site data center audits and thus cannot be provided by any cloud host)? For instance, what about Heroku/EC2 prohibits me from using Authorize.net as my payment processor, provided I never store card data?

I tried installing spree the other day, a rails shopping app, and I gave up after entering gem dependency hell and the no local file policy. Went faster on my own server with nginx+passenger.

bgnm2000 17y ago

Exact same experience yesterday. Weird.

bphogan 17y ago
You will. Heroku has three big limitations that can make your app a no-go there. The first is only hourly cron tasks which means doing sweeping every 15 minutes is not possible. Not terrible, but sometimes a showstopper if you're trying to do background tasks frequently. The second is that it's a read-only filesystem which means you either don't use the filesystem for your work, or you use S3. S3 is great, but is another service you need to monitor and pay for. You also will need to employ other solutions to compress CSS, JS files, or to create a cache. Third, there's no shell. There's a console, like the Rails console, but you're not going to be setting things up yourself. Heroku is a heck of a platform. I run tons of stuff there, even on the free plans with no problems. However, the limitations can be showstoppers for you depending on 1. how much hackery you want to do and 2. if it's even possible.
- andrewvc 17y ago
  If you need to perform background tasks more frequently you can always spawn a worker process. I find that the read only FS is a good thing, decoupling storage from app servers really helps wrt to scaling.

blasdel 17y ago

Though they just fucked it up in the betas by depending on rubygems-1.3.6, it's not so hard to get it running on Heroku. You run the rake tasks to copy the public directories from extensions to the root one locally before pushing, you pre-cache the generated CSS (not a problem in the betas, they eliminated sass), and setup asset image uploads to go to S3. The real problem with hosting Spree on Heroku is having to spend $100/m for an IP for SSL. The actual cost for setting up ELB instances to get extra IPs for SSL is $20/m. That's a problem when you want to set up a bunch of differently branded storefronts. It's the main reason why I'm doing DIY with http://github.com/wr0ngway/rubber/ http://github.com/wr0ngway/rubber/ instead of using Heroku for the spree project I'm working on right now.

hopeless 17y ago
The SSL thing is really annoying and expensive but I think there's sufficient demand/pressure that Heroku will find a better alternative... possibly with the help of Amazon.
- jackowayed 17y ago
  They really need to. If the thing you're doing is important enough that you need SSL (and a custom domain), you have to be pretty big for SSL not to be prohibitively expensive. SSL alone is as expensive as a 1.5 GB slice from slicehost. I know it's not really their fault, but they need to work with amazon to get several IPs for each of their images, or something.

xal 17y ago

You cannot be PCI DSS compliant on Heroku unless you only use paypal express or google checkout for your payment backend. Be mindful of that before you commit to something like spree. I recommend Shopify instead :D

grahamr 17y ago
Is this accurate that paypal express and google checkout are the only legitimate ways to accept payments while deployed on Heroku?
qeorge 17y ago
This doesn't sound right to me. Do you perhaps mean PCI Level 1 compliance (which requires on site data center audits and thus cannot be provided by any cloud host)? For instance, what about Heroku/EC2 prohibits me from using Authorize.net as my payment processor, provided I never store card data?