Christoph Hochstrasser

Running Sylius on Heroku

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Sylius is a modern ecommerce solution for PHP, built on Symfony 2. In this post we will explore together how simple it’s to use Heroku to setup your own shop with Sylius.

What we need

Getting setup

TL;DR: Check out the Github repo.

First setup a Sylius project with Composer:

$ composer create-project sylius/sylius -s dev myshop

Grab some coffee. This takes a while. When asked about the database driver enter pdo_pgsql, and when asked about the mailer host enter smtp.mandrillapp.com. Leave everything else at the default values by hitting the Enter key.

Now create a free Heroku Account and create an app with the heroku tool:

$ heroku create --buildpack git://github.com/CHH/heroku-buildpack-php

(If you are located in Europe add --region eu to the latter command to get a speedier setup)

To run Sylius we need a database and a mail server, so let’s add the Heroku Postgres and the Mandrill addons to our app:

$ heroku addons:add mandrill:starter
$ heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:dev

We need to do one more step to setup Heroku Postgres. You might have noticed this output when adding the addon:

Adding heroku-postgresql:dev on frozen-island-9860... done, v3 (free)
Attached as HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_GRAY_URL
Database has been created and is available
 ! This database is empty. If upgrading, you can transfer
 ! data from another database with pgbackups:restore.
Use `heroku addons:docs heroku-postgresql` to view documentation.

To get our Postgres database finally ready, we have one more step ahead of us. If you look closer at the output in your own console, you will notice that the color in HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_GRAY_URL is a different one than here. Copy the whole string HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_GRAY_URL and run this in your terminal:

$ heroku pg:promote HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_GRAY_URL
Promoting HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_GRAY_URL to DATABASE_URL... done

Let’s also turn on the labs feature user-env-compile, we need it later on.

$ heroku labs:enable user-env-compile

When deploying to Heroku, you don’t store your sensible configuration values, like the database credentials not in your repository. You add them as configuration variables to your Heroku app. These configuration variables are then available as environment variables in your processes, i.e. in the $_SERVER and $_ENV superglobals of PHP or via getenv().

So we need a PHP config file which reads this environment variables and sets the right container parameters. The Heroku Postgres addon sets the DATABASE_URL environment variable, and the Mandrill addon sets the MANDRILL_USERNAME and MANDRILL_APIKEY variables, which are the SMTP credentials.

Make a file named parameters.php in the app/config/ directory, and put the following into it:

<?php

if (isset($_ENV['DATABASE_URL'])) {
    $dbUrl = $_ENV['DATABASE_URL'];
    $parts = parse_url($dbUrl);

    $container->setParameter('sylius.database.driver', 'pdo_pgsql');
    $container->setParameter('sylius.database.host', $parts['host']);
    $container->setParameter('sylius.database.name', trim($parts['path'], '/'));
    $container->setParameter('sylius.database.user', $parts['user']);
    $container->setParameter('sylius.database.password', $parts['pass']);
    $container->setParameter('sylius.database.port', $parts['port']);
}

if (isset($_ENV['SECRET'])) {
    $container->setParameter('sylius.secret', $_ENV['SECRET']);
}

if (isset($_ENV['MANDRILL_USERNAME']) and isset($_ENV['MANDRILL_APIKEY'])) {
    $container->setParameter('sylius.mailer.user', $_ENV['MANDRILL_USERNAME']);
    $container->setParameter('sylius.mailer.password', $_ENV['MANDRILL_APIKEY']);
}

Next add this file to your imports in your app/config/config.yml, so it looks like this:

imports:
    - { resource: parameters.yml }
    - { resource: security.yml }
    - { resource: sylius.yml }
    - { resource: parameters.php }

The custom PHP buildpack we’re using, reads some config settings from the composer.json stored in extra.heroku.

{
    …
    "extra": {
        …
        "heroku": {
            "compile": [
                "php app/console assetic:dump --env=prod"
            ]
        }
    }
}

We are almost done! Now we need to deploy the code to Heroku. Deploying to Heroku is done with a git push of the master branch to the heroku remote.

$ git push heroku master

Don’t worry when assetic:dump fails, this is expected and we will fix this in a minute. When the push was successful use the sylius:install command to setup Sylius. You can run any console command in a new dyno with heroku run:

$ heroku run php app/console sylius:install --env=prod

Last, let’s fix the assets by forcing a full redeploy:

$ git commit -m "Rebuild" --allow-empty && git push heroku master

You can now use heroku open to open your fresh Sylius site in your browser, or run heroku apps:info and copy the “Web URL” and open it in your browser.

Further reading