For developers and businesses offering a web-based product, automated browser testing is a critical tool to ensure continuous delivery of a reliable service. Developers write browser tests by scripting actions against a real browser, simulating real usage by navigating, selecting, and making assertions about web pages and their document elements. In this post, we introduce a new community buildpack that helps with automated browser testing. The new buildpack resolves installation reliability problems in the existing Chrome browser buildpacks for Heroku apps. Browser Testing on Heroku Developer ..read more

How to Build and Deploy a Node.js App That Uses OpenAI’s APIs Near the end of 2023, ChatGPT announced that it had 100M weekly users. That’s a massive base of users who want to take advantage of the convenience and power of intelligent question answering with natural language. With this level of popularity for ChatGPT, it’s no wonder that software developers are joining the ChatGPT app gold rush, building tools on top of OpenAI’s APIs. Building and deploying a GenAI-based app is quite easy to do—and we’re going to show you how! In this post, we walk through how to build a Node.js application t ..read more

Introducing pgvector for Heroku Postgres Over the past few weeks, we worked on adding pgvector as an extension on Heroku Postgres. We're excited to release this feature, and based on the feedback on our public roadmap, many of you are too. We want to share a bit more about how you can use it and how it may be helpful to you. All Standard-tier or higher databases running Postgres 15 now support the pgvector extension. You can get started by running CREATE EXTENSION vector; in a client session. Postgres 15 has been the default version on Heroku Postgres since March 2023. If you're on an older ve ..read more

In this post, we’d like to share an example of the kind of behind-the-scenes work that the Heroku team does to continuously improve the platform based on customer feedback. The Heroku Common Runtime is one of the best parts of Heroku. It’s the modern embodiment of the principle of computing resource time-sharing pioneered by John McCarthy and later by UNIX, which evolved into the underpinnings of much of modern-day cloud computing. Because Common Runtime resources are safely shared between customers, we can offer dynos very efficiently, participate in the GitHub Student Program, and run the He ..read more

This post previously appeared on the Salesforce Architects blog. Event-driven application architectures have proven to be effective for implementing enterprise solutions using loosely coupled services that interact by exchanging asynchronous events. Salesforce enables event-driven architectures (EDAs) with Platform Events and Change Data Capture (CDC) events as well as triggers and Apex callouts, which makes the Salesforce Platform a great way to build all of your digital customer experiences. This post is the first in a series that covers various EDA patterns, considerations for using them, a ..read more

This post is an update on a previous post about how Heroku handles incident response. As a service provider, when things go wrong, you try to get them fixed as quickly as possible. In addition to technical troubleshooting, there’s a lot of coordination and communication that needs to happen in resolving issues with systems like Heroku’s. At Heroku we’ve codified our practices around these aspects into an incident response framework. Whether you’re just interested in how incident response works at Heroku, or looking to adopt and apply some of these practices for yourself, we hope you find this ..read more

Incidents are inevitable. Any platform, large or small will have them. While resiliency work will definitely be an important factor in reducing the number of incidents, hoping to remove all of them (and therefore reach 100% uptime) is not an achievable goal. We should, however, learn as much as we can from incidents, so we can avoid repeating them. In this post, we will look at one of those incidents, #2105, see how it happened (spoiler: I messed up), and what we’re doing to avoid it from happening again (spoiler: I’m not fired). Git push inception Our Git server is a component written in Go w ..read more

Your app is slow. It does not spark joy. This post will use memory allocation profiling tools to discover performance hotspots, even when they're coming from inside a library. We will use this technique with a real-world application to identify a piece of optimizable code in Active Record that ultimately leads to a patch with a substantial impact on page speed. In addition to the talk, I've gone back and written a full technical recap of each section to revisit it any time you want without going through the video. I make heavy use of theatrics here, including a Japanese voiceover artist, animo ..read more

There are always challenges when it comes to debugging applications. Node.js' asynchronous workflows add an extra layer of complexity to this arduous process. Although there have been some updates made to the V8 engine in order to easily access asynchronous stack traces, most of the time, we just get errors on the main thread of our applications, which makes debugging a little bit difficult. As well, when our Node.js applications crash, we usually need to rely on some complicated CLI tooling to analyze the core dumps. In this article, we'll take a look at some easier ways to debug your Node.js ..read more

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