将Rails应用程序编译为Heroku之外的块是否有好处？ 可以做成非Heroku的吗？

Question

Is there a spec, whitepaper, anything at all out there, regarding what a slug is in the Heroku context? I've always noticed how Heroku compiles Rails apps into slugs, increasing performance, at least within their proprietary environment.

Is there a way to do this outside of Heroku, and/or take advantage of it within a different environment?

Answer 1

As pointed out by John Beynon above, the 'compilation' is another name for the build pack process. When you push your code to Heroku we resolve all depedencies and TGZ the resulting package into a "slug".

The process is open source, with full documentation and links to the various supported buildpacks on our devcenter . If you want the technical details of exactly what goes on, refer to the buildpack api doc .

We have already seen some other platforms start to adopt buildpacks. It would be great to see anyone who likes adopt them and provide feedback.

Answer 2

I've not seen any documentation aside from this but it's not 'compiling' in the traditional sense of the word.

They take the git repo you have pushed your application into, remove the .git directory, clean up unnecessary directories, process .slugignore file to remove any bits you don't need at runtime (like tests etc, etc), they then include dependencies and then create a smaller version of your application which is more easily distributed across the dyno grid. The smaller your slug size the faster it is to scale your application because each dyno you add receives a fresh copy of the 'compiled' slug.