Subversion + Ruby on Heroku via Buildpacks

Back in 2012, I wrote a post about Redmine and Subversion on Heroku that involved some funky hacks in order to build a working svn binary that could be uploaded as part of your Git payload.

This can be done a lot more cleanly by taking advantage of Heroku Buildpacks.

All of the instructions I provided in my previous post can now be distilled into a single buildpack install command.

If we want to leverage an existing solution, we just add the Subversion Buildpack to our app.

The main “gotcha” here is that we can only have ONE buildpack defined at a time, which is problematic because our app’s environment (Ruby, PHP, Node .. etc) is managed as a buildpack (see https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks for more details).

In order to get around this limitation though, we can leverage another buildpack, known as the heroku-buildpack-multi buildpack which allows us to define multiple buildpacks.

For our purposes, we’re going to add Subversion and Ruby to our app:

$ cd /path/to/app

$ heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git

$ cat .buildpacks
https://github.com/cucumber-ltd/heroku-buildpack-subversion.git
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby.git

$ git commit .buildpacks -m "Add Buildpacks"
$ git push heroku master

This has helped me with my Redmine deployment on Heroku. Did it help you at all? Did I get something wrong. Let me know ;)