How do you package extensions for Heroku?

Question

I have a gem that uses a binary (htmldoc) that is not bundled into the gem as a native extension (so you can't run rake gems:build to have htmldoc installed). The host machine has to have the htmldoc binary compiled and installed on it in order for the gem to work. How do you get binaries to compile and install when your heroku instance starts up?

Answer 1

I don't think it is possible to have binaries installed on Heroku that are not built as part of a gem. Try asking Heroku Support directly, they're usually very helpful.

Answer 2

If you compile the binary for the appropriate version of Debian (see http://docs.heroku.com/stack) then you can put the binary in a bin/ subdirectory of your app and run it from there.