Setup Yii2 Advanced on Heroku

Question

I am needing some help setting up a Yii2 Advanced Application on Heroku. I have already installed Yii locally using Composer, following their guide exactly: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc-2.0/guide-tutorial-advanced-app.html

My website works as it should locally, with frontend and backend:

http://localhost/yii2app/frontend/web/
http://localhost/yii2app/backend/web/

When I push it and run it on Heroku, I get errors complaining that some files are not found. What is weird, is with a bash terminal to my Heroku app, I can verify that the file is in fact there! Is Heroku not liking the '../../' to change directory?

PHP Fatal error:  require(): Failed opening required '/app/frontend/web/../../common/config/main-local.php'  
include_path='.:/app/.heroku/php/lib/php') in /app/frontend/web/index.php on line 12

In 'frontend/web/index.php' is Yii's stock code (line 12 is main-local.php):

$config = yii\helpers\ArrayHelper::merge(
require(__DIR__ . '/../../common/config/main.php'),
require(__DIR__ . '/../../common/config/main-local.php'),
require(__DIR__ . '/../config/main.php'),
require(__DIR__ . '/../config/main-local.php')
);

If it had to do with the '../../' to change directory, then I would think the first require would have an error (for the main.php entry).

What am I missing to get Yii2 advanced running on Heroku?

UPDATE - I created a new Yii2 basic app. Should work and be simple, so I thought. Apparently even the basic app does not run on Heroku. There MUST be something left out from the docs, somewhere... Used composer to install Yii2 basic, put it under git, pushed it to a new heroku stack. Went to check out my app on heroku, adding /web/index.php to the end of the url.

ReflectionException
Class yii\debug\Module does not exist

I then put index.php in the root directory containing phpinfo(). I can confirm I get a phpinfo report. So php is running, it reports PHP 5.6.5.

Seems like Yii2 and Heroku do not play well without some magical (and un-documented) tricks. I have searched, and searched, and searched, and I can't find anything about this. I can't possibly be the only one trying to get a Yii app onto Heroku.

So I tried CloudControl. I deployed my stock Yii2 basic app to cloudcontrol, again I get a phpinfo report on the root index.php. Navigate to /web/index.php and get errors:

Invalid Parameter – yii\base\InvalidParamException
The file or directory to be published does not exist: /srv/www/code/vendor/bower/jquery/dist

What gives! I can run this locally just fine. When I push it to a cloud based host (Heroku or CloudControl) it fails! I figured the yiibasic app would be better to at least get it running for PoC, but Yii out of the box, will not run on either of those services. There is something not mentioned that I am missing.

Answer 1

Finally after hours and hours of messing around, I figured it out. Well, I still have one question left that I need to test (and try again). However, I managed to get both the yii basic and yii advanced apps running on Heroku. Still got errors on CloundControl though, but that's for another day.

I was missing 2 entries in my composer.json file. I dunno why these are not included in the Yii documentation if they are required in production. Here is my require block (I did not have to edit the require-dev section, just require):

"fxp/composer-asset-plugin": "*",
"ext-gd": "*"

The composer asset plugin was absolutely required. The GD extension is needed for the contact us page (I assume the captcha). I also commented out the first 2 lines in web/index.php for the YII_DEBUG defines. Once I did that, updated composer, updated git, and pushed, magic happened :)

I don't think they inform you that you need to edit web/index.php to remove them in the Yii2 docs. Seems they are only interested in getting you going for development. Yes the index file has comments, but we need to know to look there! If you don't remove them, Yii will load your debug tools, which don't exist. I assume when Heroku receives the push, it runs composer from the "require" block.

As for the Advanced template.. Frontend and Backend index.php files already have the debugging constants correct for dev and production. You just have to run php init --env=Production --overwrite=All on the server (I couldn't get heroku to do this, but another day). The Yii docs have you run init, then select development. This takes everything from the "environments/dev" folder and overwrite them in their locations in your app. This will fail when in development. So you have to switch it to production, which moves your production files into use. I understand why you would have these, so I get it.. Like I said, I tried heroku run bash, then running php init --env=Production --overwrite=All from the apps directory but it didn't seem to make the switch. So my app was missing the frontend/web/index.php file, and many more.

I was wondering how 'frontend/web/index.php' wasn't even in the directory, but further inspection I saw that many directories have gitignore files. So when you 'git push heroku master', 'frontend/web/index.php' along with the rest, never get pushed because they are ignored. So because I couldn't get Heroku to run Yii's init into production, my files just were not there.

Simple fix to get me running on Heroku with Yii Advanced (including adding the 2 mentioned packages to composer.json): I deleted all the gitignore files, ran init choosing production, updated git, and pushed to heroku. It runs :)

Now I need to figure out how to get init to do this for me so I don't have to delete the gitignore files.

As for this question, it is solved. Heroku can run Yii2 basic and advanced. The biggest issue I see is the Yii docs lacking the necessary composer packages to run in production. So I wonder if it's just Heroku needing those packages...