[Chicken-users] Chicken on Heroku

[Evan Hanson]

A few days ago I put together a buildpack that allows one to run Chicken
apps on Heroku; figured I'd share it here in case someone else finds it
useful.

A "buildpack", for the tragically unhip, is just a handful of scripts to
bootstrap an environment for a Heroku process. This one installs Chicken
4.7.0 and runs a standard chicken-install for your program -- apps can
be written just like eggs, with setup- and meta-files per usual.

Defining a default command to run once everything is installed is the
only weird part; Heroku uses a file called a Procfile[1] to specify
processes, which you can use to start e.g. an awful app on the correct
port for the instance:

    web: awful --port=$PORT example.scm

If no Procfile is present, the buildpack will try to run a file called
`run.scm` in your application's root. This may or may not be a good
default -- I'm open to suggestions.

chickadee, pastiche and the handful of awful apps that I tried worked
without any real configuration; there's an example in the README. The
repository is located here:

    https://github.com/evhan/heroku-buildpack-chicken

Hopefully this'll help someone get some hot Chicken-on-cloud action...

Cheers,

Evan

[1]: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/procfile