Heroku Buildpack for Custom Binaries

This is a Heroku buildpack for adding pre-compiled custom binaries into your project.

Usage

Add this buildpack to your Heroku project:

heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/tonyta/heroku-buildpack-custom-binaries#v1.0.0

Add a .custom_binaries file to the root of your project with the names and urls of your gzipped tarballed binary (YAML format):

# app_root/.custom_binaries
executable-name: https://s3-us-wet-1.amazonaws.com/url-to-your-binary/your-archive.tar.gz
another-binary: https://s3-us-wet-1.amazonaws.com/url-to-other-binary/archive.tar.gz

That's it!

How it works

This buildpack will unarchive your binary and add it to /app/custom_bin when Heroku compiles your project's slug. It will also create a profile.d script that will append this directory to $PATH to your binary whenever your app is deployed.

Sounds great! But how do I build a binary that works with Heroku?

Great news! All Heroku projects use Heroku's Cedar-14 stack on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so you have to do is compile your binary on a similar environment, compress it into a gzipped tarball, then host it somewhere it's available via url.

Compile your binary for Heroku

The simplest way to do this is to compile from source on either a fresh Heroku project or using the Heroku's Cedar-14 docker image.

Using Heroku

Create a blank Heroku project:

heroku create
heroku run bash --app that-projects-name

Then you can build from source and transfer it locally using git or scp.

Docker Cedar-14 Image

You can also use Heroku's official Cedar-14 image:

docker run -it heroku/cedar:14 bash

This has the additional convenience of being able transfer your binary to a bind-mounted volume when you use the -v flag.

Host a gzipped tarball

Build a gzipped tarball bundle of the resulting binary:

tar -cvzf archive-name.tar.gz binary-to-compress

Then make it available via URL through Amazon S3 or your favorite online file storage.

airslie / heroku-buildpack-custom-binaries