Nginx and Heroku. Serving Static Files

Question

Goal:

Going to https://secret-sands-1568.herokuapp.com/myFile.html will display the content of client/myFile.html sent by Nginx.

---

From what I understand, Heroku dynos are normally used for Nodejs/Ruby/other apps but they can be converted to anything by modifying the buildrack.

• I copied the content of https://github.com/theoephraim/nginx-buildpack .
• I added a folder named tmp with a file app-initialized .
• I added a folder named client with a file myFile.html .

In config/nginx.conf.erb , I changed location / by

    location / {
        root   client;
        index  index.html index.htm;
    }

• I created a file Procfile with content: web: bin/start-nginx .

• I entered heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ryandotsmith/nginx-buildpack.git .

• I entered git init heroku create git push heroku master heroku ps:scale web=1 .

---

Yet, when I go https://secret-sands-1568.herokuapp.com/myFile.html , there's nothing. Heroku logs says:

2015-05-19T07:13:32.990254+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:33.995458+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:34.998228+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:36.000823+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:37.005955+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:38.008548+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:39.011184+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:40.013788+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:41.016516+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:42.019372+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:43.023551+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:44.029985+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:45.035183+00:00 app[web.1]: buildpack=nginx at=app-initialization
2015-05-19T07:13:45.910618+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Error R10 (Boot timeout) -> Web process failed to bind to $PORT within 60 seconds of launch
2015-05-19T07:13:45.910618+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Stopping process with SIGKILL
2015-05-19T07:13:46.732519+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to crashed
2015-05-19T07:13:46.718745+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Process exited with status 137
2015-05-19T07:17:12.890713+00:00 heroku[router]: at=error code=H10 desc="App crashed" method=GET path="/" host=obscure-caverns-1927.herokuapp.com request_id=6d15e849-ce45-41bc-9bad-60d9eb0454ef fwd="24.200.222.98" dyno= connect= service= status=503 bytes=
2015-05-19T07:17:13.039723+00:00 heroku[router]: at=error code=H10 desc="App crashed" method=GET path="/favicon.ico" host=obscure-caverns-1927.herokuapp.com request_id=7aeecc36-05b5-4799-bf0a-6ba97b2a6190 fwd="24.200.222.98" dyno= connect= service= status=503 bytes=
2015-05-19T07:17:18.350029+00:00 heroku[router]: at=error code=H10 desc="App crashed" method=GET path="/myFile" host=obscure-caverns-1927.herokuapp.com request_id=cb77356f-ddf3-4795-b56d-fa9cde5d134a fwd="24.200.222.98" dyno= connect= service= status=503 bytes=
2015-05-19T07:17:18.471762+00:00 heroku[router]: at=error code=H10 desc="App crashed" method=GET path="/favicon.ico" host=obscure-caverns-1927.herokuapp.com request_id=64a89596-b287-4b89-a3ce-ed750e4fb1c1 fwd="24.200.222.98" dyno= connect= service= status=503 bytes=
2015-05-19T07:17:22.250495+00:00 heroku[router]: at=error code=H10 desc="App crashed" method=GET path="/favicon.ico" host=obscure-caverns-1927.herokuapp.com request_id=4ccda4e8-1532-49dc-8658-e67312ef333d fwd="24.200.222.98" dyno= connect= service= status=503 bytes=
2015-05-19T07:17:22.125124+00:00 heroku[router]: at=error code=H10 desc="App crashed" method=GET path="/myFile.html" host=obscure-caverns-1927.herokuapp.com request_id=33cdee81-2dda-44cb-acf7-2dc5b4156ef2 fwd="24.200.222.98" dyno= connect= service= status=503 bytes=

What am I doing wrong? My goal is to have a stand-alone Nginx server that deserve static file.

Answer 1

Edit : For serving static files specifically, you don't need to go through all the effort of this. There's a buildpack heroku-community/static which is hugely more simple than the nginx ones, and the instructions cater to static sites. And I just got my Angular site working using it.

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I know this probably won't help the original asker, but it will probably help others who find this.

Note : This is only a partial answer. I'm still looking for more debugs. But I managed to get mine to go from a Timeout to serving all 404 pages by doing the following.

Also note, I'm not using one from github. I'm using https://elements.heroku.com/buildpacks/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nginx , added via heroku buildpacks:add heroku-community/nginx

Procfile:

web: bin/start-nginx-solo

This should serve static files instead of trying to route to another listener.

So far, I keep getting nginx errors as follows: open() "/dist/index.html" failed (2: No such file or directory) (These are from app[web.1] ). The build was successful, but it just can't locate any of the files. Still working on that, but at least it doesn't crash due to boot timeouts anymore.