Oscar Romero creaturenex

How We Deployed Image Processing to Heroku in Support of a Rails 6 Application

Our app was already deployed and working on Heroku with MiniMagick. There were a few features of Image Processing that were appealing, performance and autorotation, and it appeared to be a straightforward swap.

Locally, we had run brew install vips on our MacBooks to get it running. That was early in the process and a detail long forgotten. When I deployed to Heroku @juliancheal pointed out that the staging environment was failing with an ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier::InvalidSignature error.

We were able to quickly identify the missing libvips dependency.

Figuring out how to install libvips to support rubyvips to support Image Processing was not trivial and therefore this guidepost exists.

First Things First

Enable PPA

 sudo apt update
 sudo apt install software-properties-common apt-transport-https curl

Install apt-fast [Yes! it's really fast]

Most configuration really isn't about the app -- it's about where the app runs, what keys it needs to communicate with third party API's, the db password and username, etc... They're just deployment details -- and there are lots of tools to help manage environment variables -- not the least handy being a simple .env file with all your settings. Simply source the appropriate env before you launch the app in the given env (you could make it part of a launch script, for instance).

env files look like this:

SOMEVAR="somevalue"
ANOTHERVAR="anothervalue"

To source it:

$ source dev.env # or staging.env, or production.env, depending on where you're deploying to

	version: '3'

	services:
	frontend:
	labels:
	shipyard.route: '/'
	build: 'frontend'
	env_file:
	- frontend/frontend.env
	develop:

	---
	include:
	- ".solargraph_definitions.rb"
	- "app/*/.rb"
	- "config/*/.rb"
	- "lib/*/.rb"
	exclude:
	- test/*/
	- vendor/*/
	- ".bundle/*/"

	#!/bin/bash

	# Make sure your Android device is plugged in and accessible over adb.

	#### Remember to enable virtual displays in xorg by adding the following to your configuration (e.g. /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-virtual.conf)
	# Section "Device"
	# Identifier "intelgpu0"
	# Driver "intel"
	# Option "VirtualHeads" "1"
	#EndSection

	<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Play:400,700' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
	<canvas id="game-canvas" width="640" height="640"></canvas>