Deploy Erlang Target System to Heroku

In this post these new tools will be used:

First, clone minasan and create the Heroku application on Cedar-14:

$ git clone https://github.com/tsloughter/minasan.git
$ cd minasan
$ heroku create --stack cedar-14

Now that Heroku has the cedar-14 stack if you are also running a recent Linux distro you can upload the target system created by relx directly to your app, before now we would have to build it on Heroku or in a system with an older glibc to work on Heroku’s Ubuntu 10.04.

Since minasan is using binary packages and a fork of rebar be sure to use the rebar included in the repo, same goes for relx so that including the Procfile in the tarball works. The first step will be to update the package index for rebar, then compiling and building the release tarball (with erts included and dev-mode off so the Erlang runtime is included):

$ ./rebar update
$ ./rebar compile
$ ./relx -i true --dev-mode false release tar

Using the new Slug API endpoint through hk slug the tarball can be pushed directly as a slug to your app and then scale up the web process to at least 1:

$ hk slug _rel/minasan/minasan-0.0.1.tar.gz
$ hk scale web=1
$ hk open

Your browser should now open to your new app.

A few things to note:

  • ‘./rebar pkgs’ will show you a list of available packages to use in rebar deps
  • Currently ‘hk slug’ only support sending a tarball that does not yet have the structure of a slug. So it is unpacked and repacked. I plan to support directories and properly formatted tarballs.

Designing for Actor Based Systems

Many people are intrigued and excited about Erlang style concurrency. Once they get the capability in their hands though they realize that they don’t know how to take advantage of the capabilities processes or actors provide. To do this we need to understand how to decompose systems with process based concurrency in mind. Keep in mind, that this material works equally well for actors in Scala or agents in F#. Differences between actors and processes don’t much matter for the sake of this discussion. Before we dive into process based design it will be helpful to look at a more familiar approach so we can contrast the two.

If you come from an OO background your natural instinct is to design much like you do when decomposing a problem for OO programming. After all, processes are much like objects in that they send messages to one another and they hold state. It goes something like this

  1. Determine your use cases
  2. Create a narrative of what it is you are trying to design
  3. Run through the narrative and pull out the nouns as potential classes
  4. Do the same for the verbs acting on the nouns as potential methods on the classes
  5. Clean all this up getting consolidating any duplication

For example, lets say you were trying to build software to run a vending machine. The use cases might be paying for and getting a soda. Another one might be paying too little and getting change back. So one of the narratives there might be

As a customer I put sufficient coins into the vending machine and then press the selection button for coke and then press the button to vend and the robotic arm fetches a coke and dumps it into the pickup tray. The coke is nice and cold because the cooling system keeps the air in the vending machine at 50 degrees.

Now we think about all the unique nouns in our narrative which are: customer, coins, vending machine, selection button, coke, vend button, robotic arm and cooling system. And we generally turn them into objects. Next we consider the verbs that act on those nouns and consider them for methods.

selection button : push

vend button : push

robotic arm : pickup (coke)

etcetera… After this you apply some lovely object oriented design principles and voila – you have a system that nicely models your narrative but does not take advantage of more than a single core on your system and is positively undistributable.

Oh come on you say, don’t be daft, substitute the word object for actor and you are good to go. Well as it turns out not quite. Do we really need a coin process, how about a vend button process and lets not forget the coke process?? Darnit, this makes no sense! Lets back up and see what we can do about this.

Designing for Process Based Concurrency

The first thing you must do before we move on is say this three times

“Processes are not threads. Processes are really cheap. Ohmmmm”

“Processes are not threads. Processes are really cheap. Ohmmmm”

“Processes are not threads. Processes are really cheap. Ohmmmm”

This trips up folks new to process bases systems. They want to be stingy with processes worrying that they will take a long time to create, have massive context switching times, pollute L1 cache, etc… Remember that in almost all such systems, certainly for Erlang, Scala and F# processes/actors/agents are green threads. This means they have their own schedulers built into the VM they are running in. You never have to swap out a thread to switch between running one process vs another. With Erlang based systems you usually configure one erlang scheduler per core on the system. These schedulers remain relatively constant.

With that in mind we solve some of the sticking points many new to process based systems have; not taking advantage of all the concurrency in the system or using complex “process pooling”.

One process for each truly concurrent activity in the system.

That is the rule. Going back to our vending machine what do we have that is really concurrent in that system. Coins? Not really. Slots? Not really. Buttons? Not really. Those are not activities they are things. What are the truly concurrent activities, the activities that do not have to happen in synchronous lock step?

  • Putting coins into the slot
  • Handling coins
  • Handling selections
  • Fetching the coke and putting it into the pickup tray
  • Cooling the soda

We can use a process for all of these activities. We don’t If you want to name them for the nouns that perform the activities – but remember we are not making them processes because they are nouns. Notice how we go granular here, we did not just create a process for the customer and the vending machine. We created one for all the truly concurrent activities in our narrative – in this way we leverage more of the concurrency available to us. Now we know what processes we need, the next step is to organize them.

Organizing Processes

The various languages that use process based concurrency have differing levels of sophistication here. I am going to draw on the concepts from the Erlang language which have been used in the Akka system for Scala and which I have rolled successfully myself in F#.

Again, forget all of your OO modeling techniques. Processes are not objects, they are fundamental units of concurrency. Forget all your thread modeling techniques – it’s not even close. Share nothing copy everything changes the game. To get started think about which of your processes have to cooperate with one another. In this case what do we have.

  • Putting coins in a slot, cooperates with
  • Handling coins, cooperates with
  • Handling selections, cooperates with
  • Fetching the coke and putting it into the pickup tray

and nothing cooperates with, Cooling the soda – it happens whether or not other processes are there to support it or not. Putting coins in the slot however makes no sense if there is no way to handle them, and handing them makes no sense of you can’t make a selection and making a selection… well you get the drift.

To model this we are going to use a tree of “Supervisors”. Supervisors create and watch over processes. Because of copy everything share nothing properties of actors one can’t corrupt another. So, a supervisor can watch over an actor and restart it when it blows up in the presence of some error. This means we get some incredible fault tolerance. But, that aside, lets talk about how to model these dependencies. We do so in a tree. First, we setup a supervisor at the top of the tree which models no dependencies between any of the processes it starts. In this layer we add the cooling system and then we add another supervisor which will start the group of dependent processes in the order in which they depend on one another. This supervisor will restart processes that die according to their dependencies. If a dependency dies the supervisor will kill and restart dependent processes so that everything starts in a known base state down the chain.


proctree

Now with things decomposed into processes, dependencies fleshed out and placed into a supervision hierarchy you are basically ready to go. Is there more to design for actor based concurrency – yes of course there is but here you have the fundamentals. Now it’s time to go and play with it and generate questions. Feel free to ask them here or on twitter at @martinjlogan.  I may do a second installment on some more advanced topics based on feedback.

If you want to learn more come to Erlang Camp Oct 10 and 11, 2014 in Austin!

Erlang Postgres Connection Pool with Episcina

Almost exactly a year ago I was looking to merge the many forks of Will Glozer’s Postgres client for use in a project at Heroku. Instead Semiocast released their client, I gave it a try and never looked back. (But note that David Welton, a braver person than me, is working on merging the forks of epgsql at this time). I found Semiocast’s client to be clean, stable and I liked the interface better.

At the same time I was in the need of a connection pooler. Many have relied on poolboy or pooler for this purpose but neither actually fits the use case of connection pooling that well. Luckily Eric and Jordan were in the need at the same time and created the Erlware project episcina, which they based off of Joseph Wecker’s fork of Will Glozer’s epgsql pool. Episcina differs in that it is purely for connection pooling, it is not for pooling workers and it is not for pooling generic processes.

Here I’ll show how I combined the two in a simple example.

To start we have a sys.config file to configure episcina:

{episcina, [{pools, [{primary,
                        [{size, 10},                        
                         {timeout, 10000},
                         {connect_provider, {pp_db, open,
                                             [[{host, "localhost"}
                                              ,{database, "postgres_pool"}
                                              ,{port, 5432}
                                              ,{user, "postgres"}
                                              ,{password, "password"}]]}},
                         {close_provider, {pp_db, close, []}}]}]
              }
             ]
}

A key thing to note here is the connect and close providers are function calls to modules within the project and not the Postgres client. Episcina requires a return value of {ok, pid()} and the Semiocast client returns {pgsql_connection, pid()}, so we wrap the connection calls to get around that:

-spec get_connection(atom()) -> {pgsql_connection, pid()} | {error, timeout}.
get_connection(Pool) ->
    case episcina:get_connection(Pool) of
        {ok, Pid} ->
            {pgsql_connection, Pid};
        {error, timeout} ->
            {error, timeout}
    end.

-spec return_connection(atom(), {pgsql_connection, pid()}) -> ok.
return_connection(Pool, {pgsql_connection, Pid}) ->
    episcina:return_connection(Pool, Pid).

-spec open(list()) -> {ok, pid()}.
open(DBArgs) ->
    {pgsql_connection, Pid} = pgsql_connection:open(DBArgs),
    {ok, Pid}.

-spec close(pid()) -> ok.
close(Pid) ->
    pgsql_connection:close({pgsql_connection, Pid}).

And here is the query function to get a connection and return it to the pool after completion:


-spec query(string()) -> tuple().
query(Query) ->
    C = get_connection(primary),
    try
        pgsql_connection:simple_query(Query, [], infinity, C)
    after
        return_connection(primary, C)
    end.

This example project uses relx to build a release which will start episcina on boot:

{release, {postgres_pool, "0.0.1"},
  [postgres_pool]}.

{sys_config, "./config/sys.config"}.
{dev_mode, true}.

{include_erts, true}.
{extended_start_script, true}.

Boot the release to an interactive shell and play around:

λ _rel/bin/postgres_pool console
(postgres_pool@127.0.0.1)1> pp_db:query("SELECT 1").
{{select,1},[{1}]}

Some Thoughts on Go and Erlang

UPDATE: I’m seeing that I did not make the point of this post clear. I am not saying Go is wrong or should change because it isn’t like Erlang. What I am attempting to show is the choices Go made that make it not an alternative to Erlang for backends where availability and low latency for high numbers of concurrent requests is a requirement. And notice I’m not writing this about a language like Julia. I have heard Go pitched as an alternative to Erlang for not only new projects but replacing old. No one would say the same for Julia, but Go and Node.js are seen by some as friendlier alternatives. And no, Erlang isn’t the solution for everything! But this is specifically about where Erlang is appropriate and Go is lacking.

I’m going to attempt to leave out my subjective opinions for disliking parts of Go, such as syntax or lack of pattern matching, and explain objective reasons for the language and runtime not being fit for certain types of systems. But I’ll start with the good.

Where Go Shines

Clients

As Rob Pike wrote, his biggest surprise was Go is mostly gaining developers from Python and Ruby, not C++. To me this trend has been great to see. No more slow clients installed through pip or gems! (Though for some reason Node.js for clients is growing, wtf Keybase?)

Go provides developers with a fast and easy to use high level, statically typed language with garbage collection and concurrency primitives. It would be great for C++ developers to move to Go as well, the programs that crash constantly on my machine are proprietary C++ that love to misuse memory — Hipchat and Spotify. But Rob Pike pointed out that the C++ developers don’t want the simplified, yet powerful, world of Go. Ruby and Python developers, rightly, do.

Tooling

Getting up and going with building executables depending on third party libraries can be done easily without depending on third party tools, it all comes with Go. While the tools aren’t perfect, there are tools to fill in some gaps like Godep, it is still a huge win for the language.

Where Go Falls Short

Some of Go’s design decisions are detrimental when it comes to writing low-latency fault-tolerant systems.

Concurrency

Yes, I listed concurrency primitives as a plus in the first section. It is in the case of replacing Ruby or Python or C++ for clients. But when it comes to complex backends that need to be fault-tolerant Go is as broken as any other language with shared state.

Pre-emptive Scheduling

Here Go has gotten much better. Go’s pre-emptive scheduling was done on syscalls but now pre-emption is done when a goroutine checks the stack, which it does on every function call, and this may be marked to fail (causing pre-emption) if the goroutine has been running for longer than some time period. While this is an improvement it still lags behind Erlang’s reduction counting and newly added dirty schedulers for improved integration with C.

Garbage Collection

In Go garbage collection is global mark and sweep. This pauses all goroutines during the sweep and this is terrible for latency. Again, low latency is hard, the more the runtime can do for you the better.

Error Handling

This isn’t just about having no exceptions and the use of checking if a second return value is nil. Goroutines have no identity which means Go lacks the ability to link or monitor goroutines. No linking (instead using panic and defer) and no process isolation means you can not fall back on crashing and restarting in a stable state. There will be bugs in production and a lot of those bugs will be Heisenbugs, so being able to layout processes, isolated from each other but linked based on their dependencies, is key for fault tolerance.

And on top of these major omissions in dealing with faults Go has nil. How in 2014 this is considered OK I haven’t wrapped my mind around yet. I’ll just leave it at that, with a befuddled look.

Introspection

Not having a REPL is annoying for development, but no remote shell for running systems is a deal breaker. Erlang has impressive tracing capabilities and tools built on those capabilities like recon_trace. Erlang’s introspection greatly improves development as well as maintenance of complex running systems.

Static Linking

Yes, another thing that was also in the positives but becomes a negative when used in systems that are expected to be long running. While having no linking does means slower execution it gives Erlang advantages in the case of code replacement on running systems. It is important to note that due to Erlang’s scheduling and garbage collecting strategies many of these speed tradeoffs do not mean Erlang will be slower than an implementation in another language, especially if the Erlang implementation is the only one still running.

Code Organization

The OTP framework provides libraries for common patterns. OTP not only means less code to write and better abstractions but also improves readability. Following the OTP standards with applications, supervisors and workers (gen_server, gen_fsm, gen_event) means a developer new to the program is able to work down through the tree of processes and how they interact. Go’s channels, unidentifiable goroutines and lack of patterns to separate goroutines into separate modules leads to much harder code to reason about.

Can or Even Should Go Change?

Erlang has been around for decades and Go is the new kid on the block, so can Go improve in these areas? Some, yes, but most of it can not because of the choices made in the design of the language which were not fault tolerance and low latency.

This doesn’t mean Go is “bad” or “wrong”. It simply makes different choices and thus is better suited for different problems than a language like Erlang.

How to use Vim for Erlang Development

vim editor logo

This post sponsored by ErlangCamp 2013 in Nashville which was epic!

You are about to learn to use Vim as your editor for Erlang development. You will learn how to install and use a variety of really powerful Vim plugins to make Erlang dev with Vim smooth and satisfying!

I have been developing Erlang now for about 13 years, many of them full time and even wrote a book on Erlang: Erlang & OTP in Action. I have loved every minute of it but there was always one thing that made me sad, probably makes you sad too – Emacs. Emacs is the de-facto editor for Erlang. The emacs mode included with the Erlang distro is quite wonderful. The fact still remains, Emacs, we do not like it. ctrl ~, ctrl x ctrl f etc… Nope!

Setting up Vim for Erlang

Let’s get started setting up Vim for Erlang development. The first thing we need to do is setup pathogen so that installing subsequent packages is really simple. The first thing to do is create the directory $HOME/.vim/autoload. Download pathogen.vim from here and place it into this directory. Now add the following 2 commands to your $HOME/.vimrc file.


call pathogen#infect()
call pathogen#helptags()

At this point pathogen will install and generate help documentation for any plugin you place into the $HOME/.vim/bundle directory – which you should of course create.

With this created now we are ready to start installing plugins to make your life easier. Try these on for size by cloning these git repos directly into the $HOME/.vim/bundle directory. They will simply work next time you start vim.

vimerl.vim Indenting, autocomplete and more for Erlang
ctrlp.vim ctrl p and open a powerful fuzzy file finder. Makes navigating file trees a thing of the past.
NERDTree Powerful file tree navigator right in vim – don’t use it much since I installed ctrlp though.
NERDTree Tabs Add the NERDTree file finder to all tabs you have open in vim.

Before we get into basics on how to use all these plugins to create Erlang magic I want to show you two bonus tricks I really love. First, get a better color scheme. To do this create the directory $HOME/.vim/colors and find yourself a slick color scheme to drop into it. I recommend vividchalk.vim by TPope.

Pro Tip
For dropbox or other file sync users keep all your vim installs in sync easily like so; take your .vim and your .vimrc and move them into your Dropbox directory. Then run:


ln -s ~/Dropbox/.vim ~/.vim
ln -s ~/Dropbox/.vimrc ~/.vimrc

Now all your machines vim installs will run just the same. If you have compatibility problems on any one, well then just skip this for that machine.

Ok, so now on to how to use these plugins for Erlang/Vim greatness.

How to Use our Vim Plugins for Erlang Dev

I am going to use the source for Erlware Commons as an example. So I clone it first and then change into the erlware_commons directory and run vim. Now lets say I know what file I want to update, specifically the “ec_date.erl” file. The first thing I do is type p and then start typing ec_date.erl. 

                                                                                                                                                          
~                                                                               
[No Name] [TYPE= unix] [0/1 (100%)]                                             
> test/ec_dictionary_proper.erl
> src/ec_dictionary.erl
> src/ec_date.erl                                                               
 prt  path  ={ files }=  >> ec_da

You can see that as I start typing and get to “ec_da” ctrlp has already displayed a narrowed down list of files in the directory tree under where I have opened vim that match. The file on the bottom ec_date.erl is the one selected and so just pressing enter here will open it. If I wanted to select “test/ec_dictionary_proper.erl” then I could simply press the up arrow and select it or keep typing until it was the only selection.

Now, what if I don’t know what file I want to select? This is where NERDTree comes into play. Run :NERDTree and you will pop open the file browser. Like this:

  Press ? for help             |
                               |~                                               
.. (up a dir)                  |~                                               
<lang-projects/erlware_commons/|~                                               
▸ doc/                         |~                                               
▸ priv/                        |~                                               
▸ src/                         |~                                               
▸ test/                        |~                                               
  CONTRIBUTING.md              |~                                               
  COPYING                      |~                                               
  Makefile                     |~                                               
  README.md                    |~                                               
  rebar.config                 |~                                               
  rebar.config.script          |~                                               
~                              |~                                               
~                              |~                                               
~                              |~

Here we can see the directory tree for Erlware Commons. Each of the directories can be easily selected and expanded. Individual files can be selected and opened. There are a variety of ways to open a file. Below are the most common:

  • <enter> will open the file in the right pane
  • T will open in a new tab within vim and keep focus in NERDTree
  • t will open in a new tab and bring focus to the new tab

IF you want to see the NERDTree browser in all your tabs use :NERDTreeTabsToggle to toggle it on and off. It will be the exact same NERDTree in the exact same state and cursor position on all tabs – nice! Once you are focused on the code in a given tab and you want to jump back to the left and into the NERDTree pane use <ctrl> ww

Once you have a load of tabs open you need to switch between then and to do this you need only two commands:

  • gt will goto the next tab the next tab
  • gT will goto the previous tab

Pro Tip
Map the tab commands and the NERDTreeTabsToggle command by adding the following to your vimrc.


map <C-t> :tabn<Enter>
map <C-n> :tabnew<Enter>
map nt :NERDTreeTabsToggle<Enter>

Ok, now on to editing Erlang with vimerl.

Editing with vimerl

This is not going to be an exhaustive list of vimerl editing commands but just a few of the goodies. The 20% you will use 80% of the time.

Auto-indenting

vimerl will auto-indent for you as you type. But if you come across a line that you want to indent try typing ==. Lets say you want to indent a block of code. Simple, mark the line that starts the block with ma then go to the end of the block and tell vimerl to indent to the mark as such: ='a. Now if your whole file is a mess then try gg to go to the beginning of your file and then =G to indent all the way to the end. You can do this all in one step as in gg=G.

Code Completion

ctrl-x ctrl-o after typing a module name and a : will cause vimerl to suggest function names for you. It does this by searching the .beam and .erl files in the erlang code path (code:get_path() to see what they are) as well as looking at your rebar deps_dir if you are using rebar.config as part of your project.

Skeletons

This is the feature that I loved most about the emacs mode for Erlang, well this and the auto indenting (most of the time, the fun() indenting still feels like a kick in the teeth). Here is a list of the most useful skeletons and the commands to generate them from within vimerl.

  • :ErlangApplication generate the skeleton for an OTP application behaviour.
  • :ErlangSupervisor generate the skeleton for an OTP supervisor behaviour.
  • :ErlangGen[Server|Fsm|Event] skeletons for gen server, fsm and event – yay!

Brilliant isn’t it. Before I let you go there is one more invaluable command you should know about which is :help vimerl which will give you a list of all the other useful commands you may want to use. Remember to get it working be sure to add call pathogen#helptags() to the top of your .vimrc file. Goodbye Emacs, welcome back old friend Vim.

Follow me on twitter @martinjlogan

<esc>:wq

Universal Makefile for Erlang Projects That Use Rebar

This post sponsored by ErlangCamp 2013 in Nashville and Amsterdam

At this point in the game nearly every Erlang project uses Rebar. The problem with that is that Rebar’s approach to the command line and command dependency chaining is leaves a lot to be desired. You tend to end up typing the same command with the same options list over and over again during the course of your work. Because of the poor dependency chaining you often must retype the same sequence of commands as well. Finally, there are certain things (like Dialyzer support) that Rebar does not support.

In our Erlware projects, we want a consistent and recognizable entry point into the build process. For that reason we tend to treat Rebar as a low level tool and drive it and the other build tools I mentioned with a Makefile. That makes it far easier for us, as developers, to chain rules as needed and create additional rules that add features to the build system. This allows us to integrate other tools seamlessly into the build experience. At Erlware, we have developed a pretty standard Makefile that can be used with little or no changes from project to project. You can find the whole of that Makefile here. However, I will work my way through a few parts of it explaining so you understand what is going on and can make changes relevant to your project.

The main targets this Makefile supports are as follows:

  • deps: Pull the project dependencies (called automatically as needed)
  • update-reps: Update the dependencies (never called automatically)
  • compile: Compiles the project
  • doc: Builds the edoc documentation
  • test: Compiles the code and runs the tests (designed to be called by a human)
  • dialyzer: Build the dependency PLT and run dialyzer on the project
  • typer: Run Typer on the project
  • shell: Bring up an Erlang shell with all the dependencies already loaded and unit tests compiled and available.
  • pdf: Turn your README.md into a pdf using pandoc (pretty useful at times, but completely optional)
  • clean: Delete the build output files
  • distclean: Remove the build output files as well as the project PLT file and all the dependencies
  • rebuild: Do a dist clean, rebuild everything from scratch and run both the tests and dialyzer

Now that we have an idea of the targets available lets work through the major points of the Makefile.

Defining Variables

ERLFLAGS= -pa $(CURDIR)/.eunit -pa $(CURDIR)/ebin -pa $(CURDIR)/deps/*/ebin

DEPS_PLT=$(CURDIR)/.deps_plt
DEPS=erts kernel stdlib

At the top of the make file a few variables that are set. For the most part you don’t ever have to touch any of these with the exception of DEPS. The DEPS variable provides a list of dependent applications that are used by Dialyzer to build the dependency PLT file. The others are ERLFLAGS, which is used by the shell command to correctly make your code available in the shell, and DEPS_PLT, which points to the location where the project PLT file will be located.

PLT Files and Dialyzer

$(DEPS_PLT):
	@echo Building local plt at $(DEPS_PLT)
	@echo
	dialyzer --output_plt $(DEPS_PLT) --build_plt \
	   --apps $(DEPS) -r deps

dialyzer: $(DEPS_PLT)
	dialyzer --fullpath --plt $(DEPS_PLT) -Wrace_conditions -r ./ebin

This is how the Dialyzer command is run. The main things to notice here are that a PLT file specific to the project is built using the dependencies that you described at the top of the file in the DEPS variable. Building a per project PLT solves a raft of potential problems but has the downside that the first run of Dialyzer or the first run after a rebuild can take several minutes as it analyzes all of the dependencies to build the PLT file.

Rebuilding

Rebuilding is basically a completely clean rebuild and test of the system. You should run this code before you submit a PR or share code with your peers. It basically tries to ensure that you have not forgotten or left off anything that is needed.

Conclusion

You can, quite literally, drop this makefile into your project and use it today with only some very minor modification to the DEPS variable. If you are not already using something like this in your project I encourage you to add this Makefile now. It will save you a lot of tedious typing and make your build process much clearer to your users.

Alternatives

There are a few alternatives to this approach out there. These are quite good if somewhat more complex.

Running Opa Applications on Heroku

TL;DR

As I’ve mentioned before, Opa is a new web framework that introduces not only the framework itself but a whole new language. A lot has changed in Opa since I last posted about it. Now Opa has a Javascript-esque look and runs on Node.js. But it still has the amazing typing system that makes Opa a joy to code in.

The currently available Heroku buildpack for Opa only supported the old, pre-Node, support. So I’ve created an all new buildpack and here I will show both a bit of how I created that buildpack and how to use it to run your Opa apps on Heroku.

The first step was creating a tarball of Opa that would work on Heroku. For this I used the build tool vulcan. Vulcan is able to build software on Heroku in order to assure what is built will work on Heroku through your buildpacks.

vulcan build -v -s ./opalang/ -c "mkdir /app/mlstate-opa && yes '' | ./opa-1.0.7.x64.run" -p /app/mlstate-opa

This command is telling vulcan to build what is in the directory opalang with a command that creates the directory /app/mlstate-opa and then runs the Opa provided install script to unpack the system. This is much simpler than building Opa from source, but it is still necessary to still use vulcan to create the tarball from the output of the install script to ensure paths are correct in the Opa generated scripts.

After this run, by vulcan’s default, we will have /tmp/opalang.tgz. I upload this to S3, so that our buildpack is able to retrieve it.

Since Opa now relies on Node.js, the new buildpack must install both Node.js and the opalang.tgz that was generated. To do this I simply copied from the Node.js buildpack.

If you look at the Opa buildpack you’ll see, as with any buildpack, it consists of three main scripts under ./bin/: compile, detect and release. There are three important parts for understanding how your Opa app must be changed to be supported by the buildpack.

First, the detect script relies on there being a opa.conf to detect this being an Opa application. This for now is less important since we will be specifying the buildpack to use to the heroku script. Second, in the compile script we rely on there being a Makefile in your application for building. There is no support for simply running opa to compile the code in your tree at this time. Third, since Opa relies on Node.js and Node modules from npm you must provide a package.json file that the compile script uses to install the necessary modules.

To demostrate this I converted Opa’s hello_chat example to work on Heroku, see it on Github here.

There are two necessary changes. One, add the Procfile. A Procfile define the processes required for your application and how to run them. For hello_chat we have:

web: ./hello_chat.exe --http-port $PORT

This tell Heroku that our web process is run from the binary hello_chat.exe. We must pass the $PORT variable to the Opa binary so that it binds to the proper port that Heroku expects it to be listening on to route our traffic.

Lastly, a package.json file is added so that our buildpack’s compile script installs the necessary Node.js modules:

{
  "name": "hello_chat",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "dependencies": {
      "mongodb" : "*",
      "formidable" : "*",
      "nodemailer" : "*",
      "simplesmtp" : "*",
      "imap" : "*"
  },
  "engines": {
    "node": "0.8.7",
    "npm": "1.1.x"
  }
}

With these additions to hello_chat we are ready to create an Opa app on Heroku and push the code!

$ heroku create --stack cedar --buildpack https://github.com/tsloughter/heroku-buildpack-opa.git
$ git push heroku master

The output from the push will show Node.js and npm being install, followed by Opa being unpacked and finally make being run against hello_chat. The web process in Procfile will then be run and the output will provide a link to go to our new application. I have the example running at http://mighty-garden-9304.herokuapp.com

Next time I’ll delve into database and other addon support in Heroku with Opa applications.

Projmake-mode: Flymake Replacement

There is a great new Emacs plugin from Eric Merritt that like FlyMake builds your code and highlights within Emacs any errors or warnings, but unlike FlyMake builds across the whole project. You can clone the mode from here projmake-mode

After cloning the repo to your desired location add this bit to your dot emacs file, replacing <PATH> with the path to where you cloned the repo.

(add-to-list 'load-path (file-truename "<PATH>/projmake-mode"))
(require 'projmake-mode)
(defun projmake-mode-hook ()
(projmake-mode)
(projmake-search-load-project))
(add-hook 'erlang-mode-hook 'projmake-mode-hook)
view raw gistfile1.el hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This Emacs code also uses add-hook to set projmake-mode to start for erlang-mode is loaded. Projmake by default knows how to handle rebar and Make based builds so there is no setup after this, assuming your project is built this way.

Here is my Makefile for building Erlang projects with rebar, replace PROJECT with the name of your project:

ERLFLAGS= -pa $(CURDIR)/.eunit -pa $(CURDIR)/ebin -pa $(CURDIR)/deps/*/ebin
PROJECT_PLT=$(CURDIR)/.project_plt
# =============================================================================
# Verify that the programs we need to run are installed on this system
# =============================================================================
ERL = $(shell which erl)
ifeq ($(ERL),)
$(error "Erlang not available on this system")
endif
REBAR=$(shell which rebar)
ifeq ($(REBAR),)
$(error "Rebar not available on this system")
endif
.PHONY: all compile doc clean test dialyzer typer shell distclean pdf \
get-deps escript clean-common-test-data
all: compile escript dialyzer test
# =============================================================================
# Include relevant sub-makefiles.
# =============================================================================
# These are not subdirs, they are just additional makefile information
# that happens to live subdirectories
include $(CURDIR)/docs/docs.mkf
# =============================================================================
# Rules to build the system
# =============================================================================
get-deps:
$(REBAR) get-deps
$(REBAR) compile
compile:
$(REBAR) skip_deps=true compile
escript: compile
$(REBAR) skip_deps=true escriptize
doc:
$(REBAR) skip_deps=true doc
eunit: compile clean-common-test-data
$(REBAR) skip_deps=true eunit
ct: compile clean-common-test-data
$(REBAR) skip_deps=true ct
test: compile eunit ct
$(PROJECT_PLT):
@echo Building local plt at $(PROJECT_PLT)
@echo
dialyzer --output_plt $(PROJECT_PLT) --build_plt \
--apps erts kernel stdlib -r deps
dialyzer: $(PROJECT_PLT)
dialyzer --plt $(PROJECT_PLT) --fullpath -Wrace_conditions \
-I include -pa $(CURDIR)/ebin --src src
typer:
typer --plt $(PROJECT_PLT) -r ./src
shell: get-deps compile
# You often want *rebuilt* rebar tests to be available to the
# shell you have to call eunit (to get the tests
# rebuilt). However, eunit runs the tests, which probably
# fails (thats probably why You want them in the shell). This
# runs eunit but tells make to ignore the result.
- @$(REBAR) skip_deps=true eunit
@$(ERL) $(ERLFLAGS)
pdf:
pandoc README.md -o README.pdf
clean-common-test-data:
# We have to do this because of the unique way we generate test
# data. Without this rebar eunit gets very confused
- rm -rf $(CURDIR)/test/*_SUITE_data
clean: clean-common-test-data
- rm -rf $(CURDIR)/test/*.beam
- rm -rf $(CURDIR)/logs
$(REBAR) skip_deps=true clean
distclean: clean
- rm -rf $(PROJECT_PLT)
- rm -rvf $(CURDIR)/deps/*
view raw Makefile hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now you can load Emacs and a file from your project and if it is an Erlang file due to the add-hook function in our dot emacs file it will automatically load projmake-mode. You can add hooks for other modes or simply run M-x projmake-mode.

For more documentation and how to extend to other types of projects check out the documentation.

Maru Models: JSON to Erlang Record with Custom Types

Working with Erlang for writing RESTful interfaces JSON is the communication “language” of choice. For simplifying the process of JSON to a model the backend could work with efficiently I’ve created maru_models. This app decodes the JSON with jiffy and uses functions generated by a modified version of Ulf’s exprecs to create an Erlang record. The generated functions are created with type information from the record definition and when a property is set for the record through these functions it is first passed to the convert function of maru_model_types to do any necessary processing.

I separated this application into a separate repo to simplify people trying the examples. But the real development will be done in the Maru main repo.