NOTE: THIS APPLICATION IS NO LONGER LIVE, AS HEROKU'S DYNO RESTRICTIONS HAVE CHANGED.

KeepAwake

Give your app a good wakeup call with KeepAwake. The sleeper must awaken.

Tools

Set up

Create an app on Parse. Set 2 environment variables from your terminal for PARSE_APP_ID and PARSE_MASTER_KEY.

For example:

	$ export PARSE_APP_ID=aasdfasdjfkasdjflskdflsdkf123
	$ export PARSE_MASTER_KEY=324987asdfakj3984asdlfj2387

Install dependencies:

	$ npm install

Start the server:

	$ node app.js

Navigate to:

	http://localhost:5000

To-Do

Add show pages (has all info as well as log info)
Write tests

What is this?

tl;dr => keep your apps from falling asleep with KeepAwake

The Problem

If your Heroku app doesn't get traffic which justifies you spending $0.05/hr (~$34/mo) and you run it on 1 dyno, you've probably noticed that it seems to fall asleep. If your app doesn't get traffic within ~10 minutes of its last request and you are running on 1 dyno, Heroku will expires your resource and allocate it elsewhere. The issue with this, especially if you're running anything with Ruby, is that it will take a significant amount of time to re-allocate that resource to your application and spin it back up.

One solution (with Ruby) is to create a rake task which performs an HTTP GET:

# Note: example is for HTTPS request
namespace :my_app do
  task :call_page => :environment do
    require 'net/http'
    url = URI.parse(URI.encode("https://www.myapp.com"))
    response = Net::HTTP.start(url.host, use_ssl: true, verify_mode: OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE) do |http|
       http.get url.request_uri
    end
  end
end

and then use Heroku's Scheduler Add-On to run the task every 10 minutes, preventing your app from falling asleep! Huzzah! EXCEPT...when you perform jobs with Heroku Scheduler, it spins up another dyno, thus bringing your total dyno count to 2 (aka $0.05/hr) and leaves you with a small but obnoxious bill at the end of the month.

The Solution

I created a little nodejs app called KeepAwake which performs an HTTP GET every 5 minutes on all of the domains that are saved to it, thus telling Heroku to keep those apps awake!

Enjoy!