This buildpack is no longer actively maintained. The associated functionality exists natively on the Heroku platform. Please refer to https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks and https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/using-multiple-buildpacks-for-an-app for documentation.
Common use cases are:
- Running multiple language buildpacks in sequence, such as Node.js for asset preparation using NPM libraries followed by the native buildpack of your application;
- Launching a daemon process such as pgbouncer before your application starts;
- Pulling in system-level dependencies before the main buildpack processes your application.
You do not have to use this buildpack directly on Heroku.
The heroku buildpacks:add command allows you to add multiple buildpacks to your application. This list of buildpacks is then properly visible through the API and command line, and you do not have to maintain a proprietary .buildpacks file.
For example, to have the Node.js buildpack run first, followed by the PHP buildpack (which during a build uses Node.js tools to e.g. prepare assets), run the following commands on your application:
$ heroku buildpacks:add heroku/nodejs
$ heroku buildpacks:add heroku/php
For third-party buildpacks, you will need to use a full URL (e.g. "https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-pgbouncer") instead of a "heroku/…" shorthand name. See https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks#officially-supported-buildpacks for a full list of shorthand names.
Run heroku help buildpacks for a full list of commands available to manage buildpacks.
Most buildpacks install one or more system components. When using multi-buildpack it is possible to chain buildpacks together, in the previous example Node was installed and then Ruby. For this to work Ruby must have access to any environment variables needed to boot up node. For example the Node buildpack puts a node binary on the system then adds that location to the PATH so the system knows where to find it. If Ruby does not execute with this new PATH
, it won't be able to find the installed version of Node. To support this the Node buildpack writes out an export file that contains the necessarry exports for any other buildpack to execute Node. If you are authoring a buildpack, you should consider how other buildpacks may want to access the components you've installed and write out your own export file.
You do this by writing a to $buildpack_dir/export where $buildpack_dir is the directory the buildpack is executing in (i.e. the directory above bin/compile) and export is a text file containg bash, for example:
export "$PATH:\$PATH"
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