From: Florian Gilcher <flo@...>
Date: 2012-05-07T23:27:45+09:00
Subject: Re: How do you create a Sinatra app that can generate ebooks on Heroku?


On May 7, 2012, at 4:00 PM, Kenley T. wrote:

> Hi guys,
> 
> I want to create a Sinatra app that can generate epub, pdf and mobi in
> Heroku. I have a good idea on the pdf part, but I have no idea how to
> make it work with Heroku.
> 
> I also don't know which epub and mobi gems can be used in Heroku.
> 
> Can you guys help?
> 
> Thanks
> Kenley

Hi Kenley,

the heroku mailing list would be a better place for a question like this :).

Heroku has a tmp filesystem, so you can write files to /tmp. It is guaranteed
to stay there for the length of the request, so you can generate a pdf and 
serve it. Things get problematic if you want to generate the pdf and keep it
around for later use. Then you have 2 options:

* Work probabilistically: regenerate the file each time it is not found on
the filesystem (messy...)
* Store it somewhere else after generation: S3 is a common option to do this 
and its quite cheap for low volumes.

Regards,
Florian