How does AppHarbor work? Are there any open source implementations?

Question

AppHarbor is pretty neat, but unlike Heroku, I can't figure out how it works. Are there any open source implementations? From my searching I could not find any.

My crude implementations so far have been setting up a git server and on each new repo, spin up an instance of IIS. This sort of works, but I can't figure out how "add-ons" get configured to a paticular instance.

I guess, to narrow my question down, is I'm looking if there are any open source implementations of "git based deployment" for Windows, or a general architectural overview of how this would best best accomplished.

Answer 1

(disclaimer, I'm one of the AppHarbor co-founders)

We have an overview of How AppHarbor Works. There's also a how AppHarbor works post on our blog.

In terms of add-ons, provisioning works exactly as on Heroku and I can recommend taking a look at their addon provider documentation. When a developer provisions a resource from an addon-provider, we get the necessary resource information from the provider and insert it into the web.config of the application.

I haven't seen any full open source implementations of AppHarbor out there, but Paul Stovell is working on something called Octopus Deploy (although I don't think it will be open source). You can also take a look at this post on mimicking AppHarbor with TeamCity.

I think you should run your application on AppHarbor though. That way, you don't have to maintain your own hardware, you can scale to massive loads very quickly, you get access to a rich ecosystem of powerful addons and we pledge to always offer a basic free usage tier to get you started.