Articles tagged 'heroku'

Setting up a static site with basic web authentication

Moving on from my initial Heroku experiment, I removed the Jekyll site and now have the bare minimum required for hosting content requiring authentication on Heroku

1. Create a new Heroku app
2. Add the [static site buildpack]
3. Create a folder (I called mine static) and create a file called static.json with the following contents { "clean_urls": true, "https_only": true, "root": "static/", "basic_auth": true }
4. Set two environment variables BASIC_AUTH_USERNAME and BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD - make sure that the value of password is readable by htpasswd e.g. openssl passwd -apr1 <password_plaintext>
5. Copy whatever content you are going to host into the static folder, add this to git and push to heroku using git push heroku master (Heroku will have set up that remote when creating the app). When regenerating the site this is the only step you will need to rerun.

I have a lot of Gitbook content which I will need to add to the site - for now I am manually building the books and copying them into the static folder. Next step will be to script that.

→ posted on April 2, 2020herokudevelopment

---

Setting up a static site with basic web authentication

I have some Gitbooks created for notes that I've taken on various programming books or courses down throughout the years. I didn't want to put these up on a Github pages site as notes like that probably violate copyright. So I wanted some way to hide them behind authentication so that only I could see them.

My initial thinking is that I would need some kind of server to respond to requests and only serve the content if needed. You could probably do this with S3 or some other AWS service but I'm paranoid about using those as even if you think you are within the free tier, you could still be hit with a bill for unexpected usage. I didn't trust that my site would always be configured correctly enough to avoid that. Then next I considered a site that would give me enough free CPU to run a basic server. Enter Heroku.

I tried to use the Jekyll Auth plugin but couldn't get it working.

• The gem released on rubygems is out of date and clashes with the dependencies in Jekyll 4.0. On the upside this did teach me how to include a gem directly from Github. If the repository in question has a .gemspec file at the root level then you can use the git option and pass the url of the repo e.g. gem 'jekyll-auth', git: "https://github.com/benbalter/jekyll-auth"
• Even after getting everything configured I was getting denied when trying to authenticate with my Github account. It looked similar to this issue which didn't get resolved so I decided to try something else.

Heroku Buildpack

I tried a different approach which was to get Heroku to serve the files and then use http basic authentication to protect them. Heroku has a buildpack for static sites. This is marked as experimental but it worked fine for me. Hopefully they won't remove it.

• I used the guide here to get a basic Jekyll installation up and running on Heroku. This worked pretty much as outlined.
• Then I add http basic authentication as outlined in the relevant section on the Heroku build pack page. You add the option to the static.json file and specify the username and password that you want in env variables. I only wanted a single user i.e. me so I'm not sure if this approach scales to multiple users. I think it does via htpasswd files. To set the password you must first run it through a tool to generate a hash that htpasswd can accept. I used openssl passwd -apr1 <password_plaintext>. Then you set the env variable BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD to be this value. This didn't work for me from the command line - probably some characters that needed escaping - so I just set it via the web interface.

Some misc Heroku issues that I ran into.

• I work on WSL and the snap approach for installation didn't work for me so I used the curl script. This mostly worked, however the permissions on a couple of folders were set to root so I had to chown these back to my normal account.
• I got errors about an app that I thought I had deleted. However the Heroku CLI adds a remote to the git repo pointing to the app so even if you delete the app, make sure that the remote is deleted also.

In the end this worked out fine - a lot easier than I expected and I have a website hidden behind authentication. The dyno that the website is on goes to sleep if not used for a while so the initial request for a page can be slow if the dyno is loading up but it's still only a few seconds. Now that I have a server on Heroku I look forward to seeing what else I can do with it.

→ posted on March 18, 2020herokudevelopment

---