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progrium
buildstep
Groovy2013–2015
progrium / buildstep · Archived

buildstep

Buildstep uses Docker and Buildpacks to build applications like Heroku

Systems & InfrastructureDevOps & Cloud
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
907GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Buildstep uses Docker and Buildpacks to build applications like Heroku

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-08-03 17:48:08 UTC to 2015-09-28 18:18:32 UTC.

012013-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsAug 20132013-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2013-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2013-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2013-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2014-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2014-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsAug 20142014-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsSep 2015

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Aug 20132013-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-09-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Sep 20132013-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-10-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Oct 20132013-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20132013-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20132013-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20142014-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20142014-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20142014-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20142014-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-06-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jun 20142014-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-07-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jul 20142014-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20142014-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20142014-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20142014-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20142014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20142014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20152015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20152015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20152015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20152015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20152015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20152015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20152015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20152015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
bryanlarsen·Sep 28, 2015
Does this use Heroku buildpacks or do they reinvent the wheel? Edit: Otto appears to do a lot of things. But the part that everybody's complaining about is the "magic" part, the part that sets up a system automatically based on the language of the app. Heroku buildpacks also perform this magic, and have been open sourced and have a large community that helps maintain them. They're useful outside of Heroku -- for instance you can use them with docker via https://github.com/progrium/buildstep It seems crazy to me that Hashicorp would try and reinvent this wheel. It's a problem that's fairly easy to do as a proof of concept, but it's the niggling details and number of combinations that can really explode.
In Otto, the successor to Vagrant
Lamlon·Jun 24, 2014
I do not believe Brian has a strong understanding of what it actually takes to do ops work. 1) Downtime. This is such a huge fallacy, if you think doing this yourself means no downtimes think again. If you had a top notch ops team you are still going to have outages in the middle of the business day. This team of ops guys you hire, guess what? They are not going to be deploying at 1am every day, that is not sustainable. They are going to deploy in the middle of the day, and guess what, they will make a mistake. And guess who notices outages first most times? Customers. Heroku's uptime is typically in the 99.9%'s, I don't think you can do the same with one ops guy, maybe you will get lucky, however it is more likely that you won't. 5) Buildpacks Build packs are an AMAZING abstraction. Just think about how you would solve the following with
Read the rest
out buildpacks: 5.1) Install libgeos on all the hosts running a specific application? 5.2) Create and scale new worker instances on demand? 5.3) How do you setup logging for all these servers? 5.4) Health checks for these services (tcp, http) 5.5) Alerting and automatic failover * pssh? That will work fine until you spin up a second server and forget all the incatations to get your software up and running. * Puppet? I am sorry but Puppet, chef and their ilk are horrible, who knows what state any machine is ever in at any point in time. humans will inevitably forget to ensure absent, or make an assumption about state in puppet land. Nevermind the slow feedback loop in puppet land. Oh hey you want to change all the servers running X to now run Y instead, good luck with that. * Mesos? Mesos is the best open source scheduler out there, Marathon makes it easy to deploy to and there are scripts to run easily on ec2. However if you want to install native dependencies (libgeos etc) you will still need to do one of the above things. * Docker? Docker is an amazing way to package your app up and ship it to run on Mesos, however how do you package docker apps and ship them? Guess what? Buildpacks. Now consider this on Heroku (5.1) Add the https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi (5.2) Change your procfile (5.3) There are plugin's for that Oh hey you can also write your own language, write a buildpack for it, and deploy it to production without ever having to get an ops person anywhere to setup a server for you. I am sorry but that is nothing short of amazing. 2 and 4) I agree 100%, it sucks to feel powerless and have no insight as to when things will be resolved, however if you work in any decent size org ops things will go down, and you will also have to wait to see any resolution. I agree it feels better to see people working busily in your office because you can see the sense of urgency. I 3) Pricing: In regards to pricing: yes Heroku is very expensive. However for small and medium teams it is much cheaper than hiring an ops person. You also get an economy of scale when you use Heroku; Think of all the things heroku takes care of for you: automatic failover on hardware/software(segfaults)/vm issues. Disks filling up on some host (it is embarrassing how many times I have seen something as simple as this cause issues). Agility; You need to switch MRI out for JRuby or rubinius, no problem, just update your ruby "version" in your Gemfile. The Heroku platform is superior in almost every way for running small to medium size applications then any in house cooked alternative. I am very familiar with the alternatives out there, I have contributed to dokku's buildpack repo https://github.com/progrium/buildstep, and have patched docker. There is no good behind the firewall/on my vm/hardware alternative for heroku atm. People are making progress but you won't really get anything as full featured as heroku. Best of luck to you Brian.
In Goodbye Heroku
jschneiderhan·May 20, 2014
quaunaut: I've never used Dokku so I'm not sure if this is helpful, but I've been experimenting with using https://github.com/progrium/buildstep to build containers using buildpacks. I'm finding that it allows for fast builds and a consistent image that I can push/pull to different environments. There is a PR (https://github.com/progrium/buildstep/pull/50) for adding buildpack caching that makes the builds even faster by caching gems and assets (I happen to be using it for a rails project).
In Docker: Lightweight Linux containers for consistent development and deployment

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