08 November 2012

I use heroku all the time. I don’t need to bother with sysadmin stuff. But mainly because it’s free :) Free is limited to one dyno, and to whatever free add-ons that you want to use, but that is good enough most of the times.

Except this time, it’s not good enough. I need to run delay jobs, and that would require another dyno for the worker. That will cost roughly $34.50 a month. Quite a lot for a simple fun not-for-profit project. I could potentially use other queues add-ons with pay per use costing, but I don’t feel like changing the app.

So what I did instead is, to start another Heroku app with one worker only. No web dyno. Then all I need to do is change the DATABASE_URL to be the same as my current web app.

  heroku config --app app-web # list down the config
  heroku config:add DATABASE_URL=mysql2://app-web.database.url --app app-worker

Now I’ll have to deploy to both app. Something like this should do it

  git remote add app-worker [email protected]:app-worker.git # one time only, add app-worker to git
  git push heroku && git push heroku-worker # deploy to both

Heroku will spin down idle web dyno. Worker dyno should be up all the time. I didn’t specifically test this out, but from https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#dyno-idling it only talks about web dyno. And so far all my jobs are completed.