Picky Case Study: Single Server App for Heroku Tweet
This is a post in the Picky series on its workings.
This is about running a Picky search on a single server on Heroku.
Skipping options:
Intro
Last night you got together with your friends. Beer flowed freely, smoothly moved over to wine, Caipirinhas. The sizzling of meat on a grill. Chicken hearts. Entrecôtes.
Then, pure Vodka, shots, maybe even as far as Baltimore Zoos. Women. Making out.
The night drags on. One of your friends mistakes the kitchen for a toilet. Dancing on tables. The police visits multiple times. Sausages.
The policemen decide to join you. Vomit. Promises. Friendships.
And dares. You are the computer dude of the group.
“Make a new Google in a day!” someone shouts. “I dare you!”
That’s the last thing you remember as you dive nose first into an Aperol Spritz.
Make that “eye first”.
The next day
You wake up with a grandmother of a hangover. A lingering smell of meat and vomit, caked on your lips. Ketchup stains. Who is that girl on the floor?
Blearily, you wander to your computer, take a look at your emails, a swig of water, a munch on raw bacon. Shit.
There is it. The email you’ve been dreading. A dare and promise forged in blood: “Make a drinks search engine. You have until midnight.”
Picky
You barely remember a blog post by a crazy dude called Florian Hanke, always touting a search engine’s simplicity and usability, on using it with Heroku. Man, that guy is crazy. Fucking foaming at the mouth.
What was it called again? “Pinky”? What a silly name.
Maybe he’s right, though. Let’s see.
You try to navigate Google, but the search bar keeps moving. It’s like being seasick, but on the interwebs. Man, totally netsick. Heh, netsick. snort
There it is. Found it. Man, thank goodness it’s rather short.
Heroku
This use case uses Heroku.
Heroku is a great place to host your small search engine. They are very generous in offering free servers for your projects.
The original GemSearch was running on two servers. One for running the web app, one for running the actual Picky server. Read more about it here.
This was problematic, since the data for the index needed to be on both servers. Once as an index, and once for rendering, in the web app.
Another thing was that free Heroku servers are started up on demand. This meant waiting a little for the web app, then waiting for the search server. Many people were wondering why their search was taking so long.
We can speed this up by moving the web app and the search server into a single Heroku server.
Single Server App
Picky 3.0+ offers the possibility of generating single server apps (aka “all in one”). Just type:
$ picky generate all_in_one drinksto generate such an app in the drinks directory. This app combines the Picky server with the web app.
The app.rb represents the web app and the search server in one (the separate areas are clearly marked). The images, javascripts, stylesheets and views directories belong to the web app. And the index directory is from the server.
With this in mind, adapt it to your needs.
Herokuizing this Single Server App
Four simple steps:
- First, make it a Heroku app: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/quickstart
- Index your data:
$ PICKY_ENV=production bundle exec rake index - Then, check the production index into git. The app loads the index from there.
- Finally, let it loose:
git push heroku master
One example of this is the Gem search. The code is here.
Outro
After two hours you’re done. A bit of sun next to the lake does you good. Over the iPhone you look up that crazy drink you’re having, The Ricky Martini. Man, where do they find these bartenders?
Smooth. It works. Rose’s Lime Juice? It’s good, though.
Your end of the dare is met.
With a broad grin you type your friend’s email address. Your dare. His turn.
You’re wondering though where he’s going to get a Tutu and a Scooter on a Sunday…
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