Hosting with Heroku as a Rails app?

Hi there!

I’d like to know your opinion on hosting Zammad as a Heroku Rails app, see https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-rails5#deploy-your-application-to-heroku I’m learning Ruby on Rails and have already a Heroku account, I find it quite convenient to use (no need to bother about any system administration, just push your app and enjoy). Would you see any limitation or why it would be a bad idea, instead of getting a virtual server somewhere, install a Linux image on it, then install Zammad? Or perhaps it would be too expensive? I see another vantage: if I want to make changes to Zammad, it would be quite easy to deploy them.

If you think it may work, one question on the setup. On the install process from source here https://docs.zammad.org/en/latest/install-source.html I see:

root@shell> su - zammad
zammad@shell> gem install bundler rake rails
zammad@shell> bundle install --without test development mysql

Why is the gem install etc done as the “zammad” user? Will anything break if I do it as a normal user (as I do it for other rails apps)? I’m not sure I can choose which user Heroku uses when deploying the app, installing gems or migrating the database.

Anyway, I’ll try it and say if anything breaks.

We use an own users for security reasons.
You could run it as any user like nobody or your normal user account as well, it’s “just” state of the art.

Just beware of running it as root or user that might that sudo applications without any authentication. This is a potential security issue then.

I didn’t dig too deep into Heroku to be honest, as the Feature page is quite big and it gets too much at some point (kinda out of scope here). Personally I don’t think you should do this, because you’d be missing your elasticsearch service. Also, depending on how fast your database in Zammad is growing, that service might get expensive quite fast.

You could take a look at the following virtual servers, I use a VPS S SSD for 5 Bugs a month. Runs totally fine.
Don’t get me wrong, but I personally would prefer my own administration over something semi administred. Oh and by the way: If you don’t want to care about hosting stuff, you could also use our hosted services. :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit: Forgot the contabo link: https://contabo.com/?show=vps

Allright, thanks a lot for the detailed answer :slight_smile:

No way I’ll run the app as sudo, or as a user that can sudo without password, don’t worry. But it’s true that until now, on my machine, I was just using my own user to run bundle install, rails dev server, etc, for rails apps.

For Heroku: it’s easy to setup an elasticsearch service with the free Bonsai addon The free PosgreSQL database goes up to 10 million rows. I understand your point of view, but I’m not a sysadmin (and I don’t want to be one) so having a system where you just push a rails app with git push heroku master and then everything is done for you automatically (building, deploying, etc) is convenient. I’d like to try to improve/hack Zammad, so that’s why I’m searching a solution for easy deployment.

I’ll try Zammad on Heroku when I’ll have more time (perhaps next week) and if it works, I’ll publish here the instructions.

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