Docsplit on heroku

Feb 4, 2014

I often search the web for things! But in roughly 20% of the cases even google don’t have the answer to my very specific questions. So to prevent you I just want to blog more often tech stuff again. So lets go!

For my side project slidr.io I choose heroku as a platform, because hardware sucks. But it’s (beside my current work project) my first “real” thing on heroku. So I sometimes stumble upon things I have no clue how to solve it in heroku-candyland. Like recently I wanted to use Docsplit a gem which has dependencies to some system packages.

After searching the web for quite a while I found ‘heroku build packs’ will be the solution for that. But I needed more packages and build packs usually only fulfill one dependency. So we need the multi-buildpack. You can use it for your current app like this:

$ heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git

Now you can go ahead and search the web (or basically github) for all the build packs you need for docsplit to run and put them into your .buildpacks which should be located in your projects root.

λ  slidr.io git:(master) ✗ cat .buildpacks
https://github.com/mcollina/heroku-buildpack-graphicsmagick.git
https://github.com/BauCloud/heroku-buildpack-poppler.git
https://github.com/elbongurk/heroku-buildpack-ghostscript.git
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby.git

This is how my .buildpacks looks like and docsplit runs very fine so far.

I hope this might also help you, just drop me a line if so or even if you might encounter any issues.