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Fever RSS Reader tweaked for Heroku/AWS.

There's an easier/cheaper way to do this with a custom PHP buildpack.

Follow this very concise gist for instructions.

Note: it's important to do the "optional" curl request at the bottom on a cron job every 10min, otherwise the Heroku app will reset itself and you'll find yourself constantly having to re-enter your database credentials (and it won't work on 3rd party clients).

Leaving this up in case ClearDB ends up being a bait-and-switch on their cheaper MySQL plan. If so, revert to this commit and follow instructions below.

These are my tweaks to make Fever work on Heroku. Shaun Inman (http://www.feedafever.com/) owns the copyright to the source.

This was actually sort of a bitch to set up, so for others looking to jump from Google Reader, here's how I got it working. Documenting for others as well as for myself if I ever need to move/redeploy.

  1. Step one is, really decide if you wanna do this. This is like fourteen steps and $30 for a freakin' RSS reader.

  2. Initialize a Heroku app (http://heroku.com).

    heroku create

  3. Add a throwaway php file so that Heroku recognizes it as a PHP app when you push.

    touch index.php

    git add index.php

    git commit -am "Adding index.php"

    git push heroku master</code>

  4. Using heroku bash, update the PHP build so it includes Zlib and MBstring.

    heroku run bash

    mkdir tmp cd tmp

    git clone https://github.com/php/php-src.git -b PHP-5.3

    cd php-src cd ext/zlib

    mv config0.m4 config.m4

    /app/php/bin/phpize ./configure –with-php-config=/app/php/bin/php-config make

    cd ..

    cd mbstring/

    mv config0.m4 config.m4

    /app/php/bin/phpize/ ./configure -with-php-config=/app/php/bin/php-config

    exit

  5. Re-push to Heroku, making a small change on git if needed. You can now navigate to boot.php and confirm you have all of Fever's requirements set up.

  6. Now it's time to set up the database fever will need. Download the RDS command line interface using Mac Homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/).

    brew install rds-command-line-tools

  7. Update your .bashrc or .zshrc with the environment variables Homebrew suggests. Re-source the files with source ~.{bash|zsh}rc to get them working in your session.

  8. Grab your security credentials from AWS (https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/securityCredentials); an X.509 certificate and private key. Both have a .pem extension.

  9. After downloading, move the key/cert to a .ec2/ folder that you will create within your root directory.

    mkdir ~/.ec2/

    mv ~/{path-to-download}/*.pem ~/.ec2

  10. Confirm these credentials are working by running: rds-describe-db-instances. This will run silently and complete with no messages assuming you have no databases on AWS RDS yet. Fooled me for quite a while thinking something was wrong.

  11. Now, create your AWS database. This can be done via the web interface, but was not updating in real-time with the CLI for me, so I had to start over with the below:

    rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress default --cidr-ip {your IP address}

    rds-create-db-instance --db-instance-identifier {name} \ --allocated-storage 5 \ --db-instance-class db.m1.small \ --engine MySQL5.1 \ --master-username {user} \ --master-user-password {pw} \ --db-name {name} \ --headers

    Wait a few minutes for this to create your database (you can check by running rds-describe-db-instances</code> again.

    Then authorize your IP address: rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress default --cidr-ip {your IP address}.

  12. Finally, we're ready to get Heroku running on this database. Install the Heroku RDS addon and give it the credentials it will need.

    rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress default \ --ec2-security-group-name default \ --ec2-security-group-owner-id 098166147350

    heroku addons:add amazon_rds --url=mysql2://{user}:{pw}@{rdshostname}.amazonaws.com/3306:{database name}

  13. After all that, revisit your Heroku app and add the credentials you just added here to the boot.php form. You'll need:

    • Server: the database URL (just the URL, nothing before the @ in the last step, i.e. no user / pw or mysql2://).
    • DB name: from your rds-create-db-instance {name}
    • Username: same as above, {user}
    • Password: same as above, {pw}

  14. Heroku will shut down its dyno, causing Fever to lock you out, after ~1hr if you aren't constantly hitting the page. You'll find yourself having to dig out and re-enter your DB credentials into Fever. This is a huge pain especially if you're using an iOS client and don't have access to your console to grab them.

Luckily preventing this is pretty simple. Just "monitor your uptime" (nudge nudge wink wink) with a service like Pingdom and hit the site every second, to prevent any downtime.

Close it, and you're done.

C'mon now, Google. That was mean.

Blogs that were helpful: