nchan-buildpack

This Heroku buildpack will automatically build, configure, and run nchan for you.

Usage

This buildpack will only be triggered if your app (deployed to Heroku) contains a nchan.conf.erb file at its root. See below for configuration options. If you don't know what to configure, you can simply copy the nchan.conf.erb template.

To use the buildpack, run:

$ heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/andjosh/nchan-buildpack.git

Configuration/Options

This buildpack currently installs Nchan v1.2.7 and Nginx v1.18.0 by default. To use a different version of Nchan, specify a tag in the heroku buildpack URL (to request a new version of Nchan be tagged, please open an issue).

# env variables available (with default) in the default nchan.conf
# set upon web server/process start
NCHAN_WORKERS=auto
NCHAN_WORKER_CONNECTIONS=1024
NCHAN_SUB_TIMEOUT=25
PORT=<set by heroku>

See configuration directives for nchan to populate your own nchan.conf.erb.

If you decide to use your own Procfile (e.g. you want to run a local auth server for nchan), be sure to also launch nchan by executing bin/boot along with your sister app. Here's an example running a node server:

web: (PORT=3000 npm start) & bin/boot

If you want nchan/nginx to wait until another app has started before booting itself, you can set the environment variable NCHAN_INITIALIZE_APP to any value. If present, nchan will wait until a file at /tmp/app-initialized exists before booting itself.

NCHAN_INITIALIZE_APP=true
# then, to finish booting nchan:
touch /tmp/app-initialized

Testing

git clone https://github.com/andjosh/nchan-buildpack.git
git clone https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-testrunner.git

Once you have both installed (and shunit2), follow the directions in the Heroku Buildpack testrunner README.

cd heroku-buildpack-testrunner
./bin/run ../nchan-buildpack

Acknowledgements

• nchan
• Heroku's static/nginx buildpack
• Heroku buildpack documentation
• nginx buildpack