Configuration

By default, there's an expectation that the app's build.boot file defines build task that takes care of all sorts of build-time concerns (e.g. pulling dependencies from repos eagerly). If a more complicated logic is desired at build-time, it can be overriden by specifying BOOTBUILD_CMD var that contains, say, a more complex boot pipeline. For instance:

BOOTBUILD_CMD="boot foo -x -- bar --blah -q -- qaz"

To expose more config vars at build-time, set a BOOTBUILD_CONFIG_WHITELIST config var containing a space-delimited list of config var names. Note that this can result in unpredictable behaviour since changing your app's config does not result in a rebuild of your app. So it's easy to get into a situation where your build is broken, but you don't notice it until later when you push. For this reason it's recommended to take care with this feature and always push after changing a whitelisted config value.

JDK Version

By default you will get OpenJDK 1.8. To use a different version, you can commit a system.properties file to your app.

$ echo "java.runtime.version=1.7" > system.properties
$ git add system.properties
$ git commit -m "JDK 7"

Testing

You can either test this buildpack locally with Docker, or run the tests on Heroku. To use Heroku, create a new app with the testrunner buildpack, push the buildpack code, and then run the tests:

$ heroku create --buildpack https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-testrunner
$ git push heroku master
$ heroku run tests
...
------
ALL OK
239 SECONDS

To test with Docker, first build the testrunner image and then run the test.sh script.

NOTE: The tests-with-caching target fails when downloading the boot.sh binary.

Credits

Thanks to the authors of various official Heroku buildpacks for providing excellent documentation and clearly written source code. In particular, config var whitelisting has been inspired by Clojure buildpack.