Overview

I’ve known Heroku for a long time, but never have a try to build with it. This time, I found a beautiful file indexer, h5ai, that requires PHP 5.5+, and Heroku is a perfect platform to build and host it.

PHP on Heroku

There’s a tutorial on Heroku: Getting Started on Heroku with PHP. You’d better follow this guide to have a feeling on the build procedures of PHP on Heroku.

Since I do not have PHP installed on my PC, I used c9.io to set up all the things on the cloud with a Ubuntu workspace (Cloud 9 already set all the tools you’ll need, include Heroku CLI tools, PHP, Git, composer…).

Prepare the app

OK, now let’s start with following the tutorial from Heroku. Clone the sample application, and then we’ll update it to h5ai.

git clone https://github.com/heroku/php-getting-started.git
cd php-getting-started

Deploy the app

Create an app on Heroku that used to receive the source codes, all done using Heroku CLI.

First, you need to login with Heroku account by heroku login, and create a Heroku app by heroku create. You can set the app name by pass the APP-NAME parameter, or Heroku will give you a random app name (in the following case whispering-beyond-31148).

$ heroku login
$ heroku create APP-NAME
Creating app... done, ⬢ whispering-beyond-31148
https://whispering-beyond-31148.herokuapp.com/ | https://git.heroku.com/whispering-beyond-31148.git

Now, we can push the sample codes to Heroku:

$ git push heroku master
Counting objects: 178, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (96/96), done.
Writing objects: 100% (178/178), 49.02 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 178 (delta 68), reused 175 (delta 68)
remote: Compressing source files... done.
remote: Building source:
remote: 
remote: -----> PHP app detected
remote: -----> Bootstrapping...
remote: -----> Installing platform packages...
remote:        NOTICE: No runtime required in composer.json; requirements
remote:        from dependencies in composer.lock will be used for selection
remote:        - php (7.1.3)
remote:        - apache (2.4.20)
remote:        - nginx (1.8.1)
remote: -----> Installing dependencies...
remote:        Composer version 1.4.1 2017-03-10 09:29:45
remote:        Loading composer repositories with package information
remote:        Installing dependencies from lock file
remote:        Package operations: 12 installs, 0 updates, 0 removals
remote:          - Installing psr/log (1.0.2): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing monolog/monolog (1.22.1): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing symfony/routing (v3.2.7): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing symfony/polyfill-mbstring (v1.3.0): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing symfony/http-foundation (v3.2.7): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing symfony/event-dispatcher (v3.2.7): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing symfony/debug (v3.2.7): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing symfony/http-kernel (v3.2.7): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing pimple/pimple (v3.0.2): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing silex/silex (v2.0.4): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing twig/twig (v2.3.0): Downloading (100%)
remote:          - Installing symfony/twig-bridge (v3.2.7): Downloading (100%)
remote:        Generating optimized autoload files
remote: -----> Preparing runtime environment...
remote: -----> Checking for additional extensions to install...
remote: -----> Discovering process types
remote:        Procfile declares types -> web
remote: 
remote: -----> Compressing...
remote:        Done: 14.8M
remote: -----> Launching...
remote:        Released v3
remote:        https://whispering-beyond-31148.herokuapp.com/ deployed to Heroku
remote: 
remote: Verifying deploy... done.
To https://git.heroku.com/whispering-beyond-31148.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master

Now, you can visit the sample app now with above url (https://whispering-beyond-31148.herokuapp.com/). There is a working demo: https://gsphpjon.herokuapp.com/.

Setup h5ai

Well, we have a working PHP app now. The next step is to set up the h5ai file indexer.

Procfile and h5ai source

In the sample app, there is a Procfile text file that declares what command should be executed to start the app on Heroku. It looks like this:

web: vendor/bin/heroku-php-apache2 web/

This declares a single process type, web, and the command needed to run it. The name web: is important here. It declares that this process type will be attached to the HTTP routing stack of Heroku, and receive web traffic when deployed.

Procfiles can contain additional process types. For example, you might declare one for a background worker process that processes items off of a queue.

So, the web app is started from the web/ folder (treat it as the root folder for h5ai), we’ll replace those files in the web/ folder with h5ai.

Delete all files in the web/ folder except the .htaccess. Then download the h5ai, extract the _h5ai/ folder into web/. The file structure should look like this:

web
 ├─ _h5ai
 ├─ your files
 ├─ and folders
 └─ .htaccess

In this way, h5ai will manage all directories (and files) in and below web/ that don’t have an index (index.html / index.php) file.

Rewrite the .htaccess file, make h5ai as the index page:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ /_h5ai/public/index.php [QSA,L]

DirectoryIndex  index.html  index.php  /_h5ai/public/index.php

Declare app dependencies

In the sample app, there already has a composer.json file, add more dependencies required by h5ai in this file:

{
  "require" : {
    "silex/silex": "^1.3",
    "monolog/monolog": "^1.4",
    "twig/twig": "^1.8",
    "symfony/twig-bridge": "^2",
    "ext-gd": "^0.0.0",
    "ext-exif": "^0.0.0"
  },
  "require-dev": {
    "heroku/heroku-buildpack-php": "*"
  }
}

When an app is deployed, Heroku reads this file and installs the appropriate dependencies into the vendor directory.

Run the following command to install the dependencies:

$ composer update

It will update the composer.lock as well. You should always check composer.json and composer.lock into the git repository.

Push local changes

In this step, you can add more files or folders in the web/ folder. Then, deploy the changes to Heroku with Git:

$ git add.
$ git commit -m "update files"
$ git push heroku master

Working with git repo locally

After these setups, we can add or delete files (folder) just within the git repo locally. Clone the git repo from Heroku to your local computer, add or delete files in the web/ folder, then push back to Heroku with git push heroku master as normal git operation flow.

The whole file structure for this PHP app looks like this:

your git repo folder
  ├─ .gitignore
  ├─ composer.json
  ├─ composer.lock
  ├─ Procfile
  └─ web
      ├─ _h5ai
      ├─ your files
      ├─ and folders
      ├─ more folder or files
      └─ .htaccess

More settings on h5ai can config the _h5ai/private/conf/options.json file.

For Heroku app, you can also bind a custom domain for the app, just configure it on Heroku’s website.