Creating an app on Heroku with Django and NPM

Question

I'm writing a Django app that includes some CoffeeScript in it. To allow for this I'm using django-compressor which compiles the CoffeeScript to JS before the app is launched. django-compressor requires that NPM is installed on the machine to compile the CoffeeScript.

Now I want to deploy this app on Heroku. I can't put npm in my requirements.txt so I am wondering how I can get npm on the Heroku server?

Answer 1

If you want to avoid maintaining a custom buildpack, you can use the multi buildpack.

Using the multi buildpack is super simple:

1. Run heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git
2. Create a .buildpacks file in the root of your repository with two lines: https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs.git
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-python.git
3. Create a package.json file with your npm dependencies.
4. Run npm install

Answer 2

Note: The multi buildpack is a much nicer way to accomplish this these days :)

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I've created a fork of the official Python heroku buildpack that allows an optional npm_requirements.txt for installing such dependencies.

I am now using coffeescript and less-css with django-compressor on heroku :)

https://github.com/jiaaro/heroku-buildpack-django

Edit: To switch to my buildback from the standard buildpack:

1. use the heroku command line app to set the BUILDPACK_URL environment variable:

   heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=git://github.com/jiaaro/heroku-buildpack-django.git