I recently started a pet project - some kind of interaction with the facebook API (no spoilers) – built in Ember with a Mongo data store and Rails back end.  There will be more details on that later, but as of now, I would like to complete it a little bit more first.  One thing was clear though, while I was building it, I just wanted to use Heroku to stand it up and get a standalone app running.

After the long and tedious process of bringing my computer up to date – Mid 2010 MBP, been using far-more-up-to-date work MBPs over the years, so this one kinda fell behind – I was ready to stand up a Heroku server and start working… and that was when I discovered that Heroku did not have a “Getting started with Ember” repo.  No big deal, I thought, it shouldn’t be all that hard to get up and running, they have NodeJS after all.  Turns out that it wasn’t all that easy.

As it turns out, Heroku really, really does not like EmberJS.  In the future, that very well may change, but as of right now, it was a no go.  After a whole bunch of internet sleuthing turned up no results, I just started playing around with it to see what it would accept – “heroku run bash” is a godsend.

Long story short, I ended up building a basic Ember app that Heroku didn’t hate, finding a nice mesh between a default NodeJS install and a Heroku setup, I found the “special sauce” of config settings that would result in a working application, and packaged it up in the repo embedded below.

I will revisit this at some point in the near future, as I am absolutely sure there is a way to do this without including the eleventy-billion bower/node component files, making this repo far more light-weight, but every attempt I’ve made so far resulted in Heroku crashing.

The worst thing about all this: about half-way through, I realized it wouldn’t be a good solution for my project.  Sheer curiosity and determination kept me going.  After I was finished, I figured I would share it publicly, making it easier for the next poor soul to try getting Ember working with Heroku.

Feel free to leave a comment below, or within Github, if you have any ideas on ways to improve on this.

https://github.com/jcorradino/ember-js-getting-started