devops Archives - Michael Bianco

Fixing Invalid DATABASE_URL Reference on CircleCI

I’ve become a huge fan of CircleCI—it’s the best CI tool for small-medium projects that I’ve found. Recently I ran into an issue setting up a new rails project with Postgres as the database backend with circle: However, when I looked at my database.yml the constant DATABASE_URL was clearly not being used. DATABASE_URL was properly being used as the lookup string for an ENV reference: I was stumped for a while until I ssh’d into circle and noticed that somehow the single quotes were stripped from DATABASE_URL: Circle’s build inference process involves generating a database.yml file which uses the original database.yml file to some extent…

Sending Dokku Container Logs to Papertrail

I’m a huge fan of Heroku. Although it’s expensive compared to a raw DigitalOcean droplet or EC2 instance, it’s so easy and it just works. However, there are some use-cases that Heroku doesn’t handle well. Business integration systems (eCommerce NetSuite integration, for example) often require handling requests that may take longer than the 30 second request timeout. Dokku is the next-best alternative to using heroku (if you don’t have enormous scaling needs: dokku apps are restricted to a single host). Here’s how to push your dokku app logs running to PaperTrail, or another syslog-compatible cloud hosting provider (I’m sure this approach would work for Loggly or CloudWatch)…

Tag: devops