Same add-on for multiple Heroku apps

Question

What are the best practices with Heroku add-ons? I manage multiple Heroku apps. I want them to share a common add-on. how to do that?

For example, first I signed up for Mandrill on their website. When I added Mandrill add-on on Heroku, they created a new Mandril account for me. I wanted to merge them but Mandril support said that they can't merge accounts!

Another example, I added Logentries add-on to one Heroku app. A Logentries account was created. Then I added another Logentries add-on to another Heroku app, then another Logentries account was created.

It's getting messy. Am I doing it right? How to make several Heroku apps share one add-on account?

Answer 1

Sharing add-ons between apps is possible. Once the add-on is added to one of the apps, an environment variable will be created containing the account information. You can copy the variable to other apps and they will start sharing the same 3rd party resource. The add-on will remain listed only under the first app, where it was initially added, but this will not prevent the other apps to use it.