Today we're proud to announce the availability in beta of RabbitMQ add-on by VMWare. RabbitMQ is an open source implementation of the AMQP protocol that provides a robust, scalable and easy-to-use messaging system built for the needs of cloud application developers.

Getting Started

With the add-on, provisioning a fully managed RabbitMQ instance couldn't be easier to do:

$ cd rabbitdemo $ heroku addons:add rabbitmq -----> Adding rabbitmq to rabbitdemo... done, v2 (free) $ heroku config RABBITMQ_URL => amqp://uname:pwd@host.heroku.srs.rabbitmq.com:13029/vhost 

Your application's environment will now have the RABBITMQ_URL set pointing to your new instance. Most modern...

If you develop apps for Twitter, this is the add-on for you. The Apigee for Twitter Add-on allows developers to easily access Twitter REST api’s. Through a direct relationship with Twitter, Apigee can offer users of the Add-on vastly increased rate limits automatically. The goal is to ensure that no valid application hits rate limits at all.

If you’re developing applications using the Twitter REST api, check out the add-on today. Using it is often as simple as changing your app to use the apigee provided config var endpoint instead of “api.twitter.com”. Full docs are available here, and as always please let us know how it works for you.

This past Sunday, Rails 2.3.6 was released, and quickly followed by 2.3.7 and 2.3.8. One of the major changes in these new versions is to require a newer version of Rack, specifically 1.1.0, that is incompatible with Rails 2.3.5 and older. Due to the fairly complex ways in which Rubygems resolves dependencies, this can prevent your app from starting – in your local environment as well as when deployed on Heroku. If you’ve been affected by this issue, you would see this error message:

 Missing the Rails gem. Please `gem install -v= x.x.x`, update your RAILS_GEM_VERSION setting in config/environment.rb for the Rails version you do have installed, or comment out RAILS_GEM_VERSION...

The response to yesterday’s Node.js announcement continues to be absolutely amazing.

First and foremost, we’re thrilled to see the community share our excitement about Node.js and its potential on the Heroku platform.

We do, however, also want to be mindful that we’re still in the experimental phase with this technology here. For this reason, we’re going to proceed carefully and invite testers in small batches.

So, if you don’t hear from us right away, despair not. It’ll likely take us a few weeks to get through the current list, and if you’re reading this for the first time, please don’t hesitate to register your interest at...

Ever since we launched the current IP-based solution at $100/month in response to customer demand, we have been pursuing a cheaper and more elegant solution for SSL with custom certificates on Heroku.

Today, we’re happy to announce the public beta of a new SSL add-on that accomplishes this goal. It’s called ssl:hostname, and is priced at $20/month. This new add-on will allow you enable SSL traffic to your application on any subdomain, such as www.mydomain.com or secure.mydomain.com, using your own SSL certificate. Note that this is a paid beta, and you will be charged for using the add-on through the beta period.

Full docs are available here.

Thanks to the continued support of the fantastic Ruby community, Heroku is rapidly growing.

We’re determined to keep improving our service for our ever expanding user base, and to that end we’re looking for a few fresh faces to join our world-class team in San Francisco.

First up, we’re hiring our first full-time Heroku Evangelist. This lucky person should have a serious passion for Ruby and cloud computing, along with the enthusiasm and ability to communicate to our audience how Heroku can make their lives easier. There will be lots of presentations to make, conferences to visit, and ample room to engage our developer community – including open source projects.

...

Since the beginning of our private beta Heroku has been used by developers all over the world. Recently, we’ve been delighted to see a particularly strong interest from Rubyists in Europe looking to take advantage of the deployment and scalability benefits of our platform.

On their trips to Erlang Factory in London and Kings of Code in Amsterdam, Blake and Orion saw immense interest from both individual hackers and established companies.

In August I’ll be making the trip to several European Ruby user group meetings to catch up with even more users, and hopefully gain a better understanding of what they’d like to see from Heroku in the future.

If you’re in or...

You probably already know all about our friends and fellow Y Combinator alumni at Justin.tv. For the last couple of years, they’ve been driving an explosion of live video content on the web, streaming thousands of channels featuring events and people from all over the world.

Today, things are about to get even more interesting as Justin.tv launches an extensive API that allows you to build your own live video apps using Justin.tv’s existing content and their technology platform. Whether you’re looking to enhance your own lifecasting project, or add video-based customer service to your company’s website, the Justin.tv API enables a whole new generation of exciting...

Congratulations to Michael who’s the winner of our Heroku+Twilio Developer contest. Michael got seriously busy, and submitted not one but two projects for the contest!

The first is a handy app that tells students, faculty, employees, and visitors at Duke University which places on campus are currently open. Simply call in, and it’ll read you back a list of open restaurants, libraries etc. There’s even a keypad-based search option. Seriously cool stuff! You can try it on the Twilio sandbox by calling (866) 583-6913 and entering 4456-8772 when prompted for a PIN.

If that wasn’t enough, Michael also hammered out a suite of Ruby development tools for Twilio, including...

Not too long ago building telephony apps, such as interactive voice response systems, was far out of reach for most web developers. Now, an exciting crop of new startups is rapidly changing that, making it easy to incorporate voice capabilities into any web app, or even build standalone voice apps.

Twilio is emerging as one the leading companies in this area, offering a a REST API for building voice apps.

The model is simple: sign up for a number with Twilio. When a call comes in, Twilio makes an HTTP request to URL of your choice, containing information about the phone call. The processing logic resides entirely inside your web app, and instructions are passed back and forth using XML....

Railslab is a great site by our friends over at New Relic that contains a wealth of knowledge on Rails scaling and application performance.

A couple of weeks ago they asked Ryan and Adam to stop by for a discussion of the vision behind Heroku, and the philosophy that drives the design and buildout of our scalable, provisionless hosting platform.

The interview is now available for your viewing pleasure in three parts. In the first part Adam goes into detail about the core vision behind the concept of instant deployment, and how Heroku is committed to making the deployment of Ruby web apps a seamless extension of an agile development workflow.

In the second part Ryan and Adam discuss how...

Since we returned from a fun and successful Railsconf in Vegas, we have been in full swing completing the rollout of our paid services. The response has been enormous so far, and paid services are now available to all users.

If you’ve checked out the pricing page, you’ve undoubtedly noticed our line-up of a la carte add-ons. We’re really excited about add-ons becoming a key part of our platform, allowing us to seamlessly deliver popular application services and components with the built-in scalability and ease of use you’ve come to expect from Heroku.

We’ve had a solid first batch of add-ons in beta for a while, and today we’re happy to announce the...

It’s been a bit of a blur here at Heroku HQ in the past couple of weeks. However, amidst all the launch activity we did notice a screencast so sweet we thought we’d share it with you. It really covers the whole platform exceptionally well, and we particularly dig how it manages to show off both Rails and Rack app deployment.

Big ups to Remi for putting this together, and way to shame us for not getting any official screencasts together for the new and improved Heroku. :)

Heroku is gearing up for RailsConf 09 in Las Vegas, and just like last year, we’ve got a sweet line-up for y’all…

Kicking things off on Monday, Sinatra co-creator Blake Mizerany will be hosting an in-depth tutorial on the the micro-framework that’s sweeping the Ruby nation right now.

Continuing in a similarly minimalistic vein on Wednesday, Adam Wiggins will lend his considerable Rack-fu to a talk showcasing Rails Metal – the hot new feature in Rails 2.3 that lets you build Rack endpoints for selected URLs that bypass Routes and ActionController for a massive speed boost. Heck, he’ll even show you how to use Sinatra inside your existing Rails app!

...

Radiant is an excellent Rails-based Content Management System (CMS). It was created by John W. Long and Sean Cribbs, and has been around for a couple of years, growing steadily in popularity. With the recent addition of taps and gem manifests, it’s super-easy to get this lightweight CMS up and running on Heroku.

Start by installing the latest radiant gem on your local box:

 $ sudo gem install radiant 

Now use the radiant command-line tool to set up your Radiant CMS locally. We’ll use SQLite as the local database:

 $ radiant --database sqlite mycms $ cd mycms $ rake db:bootstrap 

Before we can push to Heroku, we’ll need to initialize a git repo in our project directory:

Warning: This feature is deprecated; please use pg:pull instead.

A frequent question people ask us is “how do I transfer my database between my local workstation and my Heroku app?”

This is an important question for several reasons. First, you always own your data on Heroku, and we want you to be able to get to it quickly and easily at any time. Also – as you may have noticed from previous posts – we’re obsessive about workflow. Whether you’re debugging an issue with production data or setting up a staging environment, being able to quickly pull/push data between environments is key to a smooth experience.

Previously, we offered yaml_db as a solution....

The Rails 2.3.2 gem is now installed and available for use on Heroku. To learn more about what’s new and improved, check the official Rails blog post.

Enjoy!

Gem installation and management has always been pain when the time comes to deploy an app. Rails 2.1 made good progress in this area with gem dependency specifications, allowing you to vendor required gems with a of set rake commands. That’s the method we’ve been recommending for Heroku apps until now, but it does leave important problems unsolved.

First, a substantial limitation of the vendoring method is that it only works with pure Ruby gems. Many apps depend on gems with native extensions that need to be compiled on the deployment target. It’s no good compiling a gem on your Mac laptop and trying to deploy the resulting binary to a Linux host.

Then there’s the...

Ruby journalist extraordinaire, Peter Cooper, is a busy man. Chances are you’re already following his work to bring you the latest Ruby news on sites such as Ruby Inside and RubyFlow. Late last year he even added a tremendously useful site oriented towards iPhone and iPod Touch development called Mobile Orchard. Somewhere along the line he was also generous enough to leak the source code for Rubyflow, and now a version of that is available through Sutto’s Github repository.That’s great news for anyone looking to start their own news site, especially since it’s a breeze to get working on Heroku.

Start by cloning the source from Github:

 $ git clone...

Making Rails readily accessible to developers of all stripes is a big part of the vision behind the Heroku platform, and we try to be supportive of any initiatives that make teaching and learning Rails easier.

A couple of months ago, thoughtbot released suspenders – a freely available Rails template app, loaded with commonly used plugins, sensible configuration options and helpful rake tasks. Simple as it may seem, having a solid default app template is a really important step in eliminating the barriers that prevent developers from jumping directly from concept to coding with Rails. We think thoughtbot are doing the Rails community a real service with this project, so do yourself a...

Rubyconf is upon us, and most of engineering team will be present in Orlando this week.

If you’re attending, or maybe just nearby, this would be a great opportunity to say hi and/or ask those burning questions you’ve got about Heroku. Whether you’re wondering if Heroku will be a good fit for your needs, or have questions about a currently hosted app, we’re happy to make time for you. Just email us here and we’ll find a time/place to talk.

Last but not least, don’t forget to catch Adam and Blake presenting on Lighweight Web Services with Sinatra and Restclient on Friday at 1:15pm.

See you there!