Sphinx Build Pack on Heroku
Heroku’s latest Cedar stack supports running anything. Heroku’s officially supported languages actually have their buildpacks public via Heroku’s github, you can view several of them at:
There have even been some created as fun weekend hacks such as the NES Rom Buildpack.
Recently at Heroku my teams have started exploring new forms of collaborating and documenting. In particular editing a wiki for communication is contrary to our regular workflow. Much of our day is spent in code and git. To edit a wiki within a web browser and using some markup we’re less familiar with is an overhead we were aiming to reduce. As a result we’ve tried a few things, the first was simply using a github repo to edit markdown.
Personally I have always been a fan of Sphinx documentation. However, Sphinx has no means to secure a site out of the box. Generating the static site then running it being a Rack app to secure it seemed like a few extra steps that would hinder workflow. As a result I set out to build the Sphinx buildpack which would let you push a Sphinx project to Heroku and automatically run your documentation. The buildpack itself supports two modes, public documentation and a private documentation. To have your documentation secured in private mode you simple need to add your google apps domain as a config var heroku config:add DOMAIN=mydomain.com.
If you need more information about setting up OpenID check out my recent post Securing your organization with OpenID
$ sphinx-quickstart
$ git init .
$ git add .
$ git commit -m initial
$ heroku create -s cedar -b http://github.com/craigkerstiens/heroku-buildpack-sphinx.git
$ git push heroku master
$ heroku open