+1 on details of these plugins.

I'm having trouble with newsdesk's translate plugin from github as it
needs to write to the locales directory. It's a gui to rails i18n
locale files. I just spent a day setting up another server and
troubleshooting it at Railsplayground so that my translation team can
use this gui. I had loads of issues with gem install requests,
suspected misconfiguration at the server end, tech support overwriting
my environments/production.rb file without telling me. Got it working
in the end but it was a real headache, if I'd know I would have just
sent them the yaml files to the translation team.

I hated having to go back to Railplayground and battle with Cpanel
interface and so a plugin which rerouted file writes to my S3 account
would be great as it means I could stay with Heroku all the time (me
=> happybunny). I know I'll run into this sort of thing again with
some other plugin or app I want to run on Heroku. How are assets
handled when using a CMS such as Radiant for instance? I know their
was a tutorial, publicised on a Heroku blog, on how to get it running
on Heroku and so assuming there must have been a solution there for
uploaded assets. I figure that there are lot's of ways to write to the
local file system and so such a plugin would need to think of all
cases that it needs to intercept. No easy task me thinks.

A plugin would be a short term fix, but the best thing would be for
Heroku to introduce a feature to make this transparent. It could use
some sort of magic directory that appears to the Heroku rails app as
being a normal local directory. If the user writes to this however
Heroku would actually intercept the writes and feed them to a named
bucket on the users S3 account. Would this approach bypass EC2 scaling
issues assocaited with Heroku's architecture. I guess this would mean
that we would need some way of providing Heroku with security details
for an S3 account along with the target bucket for each app via the
heroku gem. This should allow users to be billed for storage and
bandwidth directly from S3 as Heroku is effectively only working as an
S3 uploader. Obviously the contents of this 'magic' directory would
not count towards Heroku's storage quota. A feature such as this
would mean I can stop messing about with S3 up-loaders like S3Hub or
S3fox for managing my static assets. The side benefit being that these
app assets can become part of my git workflow once again whilst
benefitting form being served from my S3 account. Obviously there
would still be a requirement to change routes for some apps that
assume they can write anywhere in the app, but this code is usually
relatively easy to find and change comapred to trying to bootstrap the
write entirely to s3 using the AWS s3gem or suchlike.

A final thought, and again only as a short term solution to my
specific problem with the translate plugin, how long are files in the
tmp and log directories kept ther, are these routinely cleared out by
Heroku's houskeeping routines? If so how often. If I knew that I could
temporarily reroute the translate plugin to the tmp directory and be
confident the files would stay there for a week or so then I could do
that as a short term hack. If not the tmp directory what about the
logs directory? Thanks.

Rob

On Oct 14, 11:00 am, Neil <[email protected]> wrote:
> Do you have links to any of these plugins at all or is it still to
> early?
>
> N
>
> On Oct 6, 10:32 pm, Oren Teich <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hi Neil,
> > There aren't any plans for shared storage right now.  I wish I could  
> > say otherwise.  The big challenge is that we're able to achieve our  
> > scaling and overall cool features by imposing certain constraints.  A  
> > read-only file system is one of those.  If we had a shared filesystem,  
> > we wouldn't be able to offer the scalability or performance that makes  
> > our platform so unique.  There are some interesting plugins that some  
> > 3rd partys have in development that will capture filesystem requests  
> > and send them to S3 instead.  Hopefully as these come out they might  
> > help address some of the constraints for you.
>
> > Believe me, I wish we could figure out a way to give you a writeable  
> > filesystem!
>
> > Good luck,
> > Oren
>
> > On Oct 6, 2009, at 2:53 AM, Neil wrote:
>
> > > One of the big issues we have with Heroku as a business at the moment
> > > is the read-only file system and the fact that this then renders some
> > > of our legacy apps, and our CMS of choice, BrowserCMS, unable to be
> > > deployed without some serious hacker-age.
>
> > > Question is, are there any plans at all for some sort of shared
> > > storage, where I can somehow define a directory or two that should be
> > > shared across all dyno's serving my application, as well as across all
> > > deploys of my application?
>
> > > For me, this is a major thing, and it would be good to remove one of
> > > the big barriers that people might have.
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