Plone hosting on Heroku with Apache or Nginx

Plone Support
1

Hi,

I'm just evaluating Plone to replace our current web site.
At the same time as changing the CMS we are also moving our internal CRM system to Salesforce, and so would like to use Heroku, with it being owned by Salesforce and having the Heroku Connect add-on to sync our data with SF.

I've got a test version of Plone running on Heroku, using the Plone Buildpack from https://github.com/plone/heroku-buildpack-plone

I've now moved on to looking at how a production environment would work, and all the advice on this site, such as http://docs.plone.org/manage/deploying/index.html recommend using Apache or Nginx with Plone for production environments, to get the benefits of SSL and URL-Rewriting.

Unfortunately, the Plone buildpack does not use Apache or Nginx, just the default Zope app server.

Does anyone have any ideas how to deploy Plone and Apache or Nginx to Heroku?
Alternatively, has anyone used Plone and Heroku for a medium size site (approx 23 million page views per year), and how did they solve the issues of SSL, URL Rewriting etc?

Thanks!

2

Hi and welcome to Plone

Getting Zope to respect SSL can be done as shown here (option 2)

https://docs.webfaction.com/software/zope-and-plone/configuring.html?highlight=zope%20ssl#using-zope-over-https

The webfaction support docs offer a lot of other good information. Some is specific to hosting Plone with them, some is generic.

Hope this helps

3

@adamc_be,
If you haven't got it running on Heroku yet, you could try http://tinyurl.com/wmpsandbox to launch Plone on Heroku.
Then look at the code behind it here https://github.com/webflowmeetplone/webflowmeetplone
With some customization you can get to what you want. At the moment, because Heroku has an ephemeral filesystem, you'll need to store all your blob data to the database, so for production on Heroku this means disabling writing blobs to the filesystem.

4

David, Wayne,

Thanks for your comments. I've got Plone running on Heroku (that was the easy bit!).
I'm more interested in how I can get Plone working together with something like Nginx on Heroku to give more functionality for a production site than the Zope App server offers.

I think I may try my hand at combing two buildpacks - Plone and Nginx to see if I can create one that installs both products. If I succeed, I'll be sure to post an update here!

Any tips on doing this though would be greatly appreciated.