Deploy PHP Apps to Heroku, Simplified
This is cool, useful, and good news but there's a "but" coming. There are far better options for PHP hosting than Heroku. Other technologies like Ruby, Node, and Java require what less technical developers would consider "extra" work and consideration. What I mean by that is that you can't just plop your Rails or node or Django or Java app on a server, visit it in a browser, and have it run. But PHP is different. Most PHP applications save for some very complex ones only need PHP installed then developing and running them is honestly as simple as creating static HTML pages.
So with that said, why use Heroku when you can use AppFog FortRabbit or, dare I say, shared hosting for cheaper and with the same amount of convenience?
Don't get me wrong, the fact that they're supporting these stacks for PHP is cool and I'm one of the minority that doesn't think PHP is going anywhere soon. I'm sure it's a pretty great learning experience for some people to deploy their PHP app on a service like Heroku - there's no doubt about the value in that. I just wonder "why support PHP on Heroku"? I mean, if Heroku one day made it impossible to run PHP apps I don't think many would miss it and may make things easier on the Heroku guys. There's no shortage of platforms that support PHP out there.
Having actually deployed a PHP project on Heroku, this would have been a godsend at the time I started. While Heroku unofficially supports PHP (for Facebook apps), their default PHP stack leaves a lot to be desired. In particular, lack of default zlib and multi-byte string support caused all sorts of chaos.
I don't blame Heroku for this, since they don't officially support PHP, but it was a PITA. Luckily, someone else had already encountered these issues, and I was able to plunk in some pre-built libs.
I chose Heroku because I wanted to familiarize myself with the top PaaS provider, but if I had to do it again, I would have bitten the bullet, learned a new language, and not mentioned it to the client. Or, if I were forced to use PHP, I'd have gone with a provider where it's a first-class citizen.
Does anyone know what this actually is? Is it just a local stack that delivers requests to PHP in the same way that Heroku does? Or did they do a custom buildpack?
I am not sure what "Heroku on your local machine" means...
I have a custom php buildpack that I made (forked from heroku, borrowed some other ideas...) but to run it locally I just use PHP-FPM and there's nothing more to it...
I'm actually a fairly big fan of running Wordpress on Heroku. It works great and it's very nice to have my Rails, Node and PHP apps all on the same PAAS.
I use the wordpress-heroku project [1] and it has been great.