Sometimes you just have a static website with one or two pages. Here is a simple way to host your static site and cache it on Heroku using a Rack app.
Your folder should be organized like this:
- MySite
|- config.ru
|- Gemfile
|- Gemfile.lock
|- public
|- index.html
|- images
|- js
|- css
To create this structure run the following commands:
:::term
mkdir -p MySite/public/{images,js,css}
touch MySite/{config.ru,public/index.html}
In Gemfile
file add the following:
:::ruby
source :rubygems
gem 'rack'
You should use bundler to generate the Gemfile.lock
file by running the command bundle install
from within the MySite
directory:
GEM
remote: http://rubygems.org/
specs:
rack (1.4.1)
PLATFORMS
ruby
DEPENDENCIES
rack
In config.ru
file add the following:
:::ruby
use Rack::Static,
:urls => ["/images", "/js", "css"],
:root => "public"
run lambda { |env|
[
200,
{
'Content-Type' => 'text/html',
'Cache-Control' => 'public, max-age=86400'
},
File.open('public/index.html', File::RDONLY)
]
}
This assumes that your template uses relative references to the images and stylesheets. Go ahead and deploy the app. If you are not sure how to deploy to Heroku check out the quickstart guide.
And there you go, a static site being served on Heroku completely cached and easily served using a single dyno.
You can see a GitHub repository with a working example here; the deployed site on Heroku can be seen here.
Bamboo apps are fronted by Varnish, an HTTP Accelerator, and we should take advantage of it. You may have noticed in the config.ru file we set the Cache-Control
header to 86400
seconds (24 hours). This tells the accelerator to go ahead and cache the page. The accelerator already caches any Rack::File
for 12 hours as well meaning all your stylesheets and images will also be cached.
To confirm it's working, let's take a look at the HTTP headers returned from your site. The Age
header indicates that it's being served from the HTTP cache.
:::term
$ curl -I http://nezumiapp.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.7.67
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 02:26:12 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
X-Runtime: 29
ETag: "a90d1cf7a727aee09abfc7df23bc0b71"
Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400
Content-Length: 3400
X-Varnish: 695131796 695100190
Age: 98
Via: 1.1 varnish
TODO: Deploy same app above to bamboo and change curl URL to that
Hey Marshall, This is great coverage of the necessary files but is a little thin on context (why and what are we doing in each part) and steps (i.e.: Create folder structure, run bundler install etc...) We should try and be as direct as possible and show terminal commands and output. Since this is such a generic topic we should probably assume a very low technical barrier to entry (i.e. could your designer follow these directions and get something up?)
Could we provide a link to a GitHub project that has a barebones site (perhaps w/ Twitter Bootstrap css and js) that is ready to deploy to Heroku (the readme should have the basic deploy-this-app-to-Heroku steps).