Deprecate (and attempt one last fixing) documentations around Heroku and Passenger

[astorije]

First of many steps of my master plan to resurrect our docs. I'll open PRs as I go.

We will not be maintaining these anymore. Some of the reasons include:

• The Lounge will not work correctly on a free Heroku account.
• No one in the core team is using any of these.
• Nothing here is specific to The Lounge, therefore many documentations online already cover that.
• Getting rid of this will make restructuring docs easier, clean slate.

[astorije]

This is a simple copy-paste of Bootstrap defaults, just like previous definition (.alert-warning). I'm not planning on making this more religiously clean as other improvements of this will take over during doc improvements.

[AlMcKinlay]

Why not just delete it?

[astorije]

@YaManiKill I will eventually, soon, as part of a bigger improvement of install docs. But until I do, this gives a bit of heads-up to whomever is using that or planning to do so (I doubt it) and makes sure that the latest revision in the git history is up to date with version at the time.
Also, I already had written the fixes before asking you if we should remove eventually, so here they are lol

[AlMcKinlay]

Alright, well these look fine then.

[dideler]

The Lounge will not work correctly on a free Heroku account.

Why is that? I've been using Shout on a free (legacy) Heroku dyno, with a pinging service as a workaround to prevent sleeping. Is there another reason why it won't work?

[astorije]

Hi @dideler, thanks for stopping by!

Main reason why we are deprecating this segment of the documentation is that no one in the team currently uses Heroku. So maintenance and testing would be done rather hypothetically.

Considering the warning in the doc that we inherited from Shout, we preferred to separate from it. I have never used Heroku so I don't know the details, but requiring a pinging service to work around a limitation of the system feels a bit wonky, I'm not sure we really want to recommend this in the official documentation, don't you think?

That being said, it's hard to estimate how many people out there are relying on which part of the documentation, and I kinda counted on these deprecation notices to make people come out of the dark :)

What's your opinion: should we keep this documentation around while informing it is not well-maintained and may require some hacking around, or can we expect users of Heroku to know what they're doing?

[dideler]

requiring a pinging service to work around a limitation of the system feels a bit wonky, I'm not sure we really want to recommend this in the official documentation

I agree. Heroku's free plan is great for trying out Lounge, but the client loses connectivity every now and then (due to the dyno going to sleep), unless you use a service to keep it awake. Heroku also offers a hobby plan for $7 which doesn't have this problem.

should we keep this documentation around while informing it is not well-maintained and may require some hacking around, or can we expect users of Heroku to know what they're doing?

I would prefer to keep it around with some warnings. Heroku's audience is primarily devs who don't want to spend too much time provisioning a server, and having users figure it out on their own goes against that.

FWIW yesterday I got Lounge to work on Heroku. The guide wasn't sufficient. Here's what I had to do (in reverse chronological order): http://pastebin.com/Tnm5hr3j. I'm not sure if some of those steps are the best approach (e.g. installing dev deps) but they fixed the issues I came across.

[astorije]

I would prefer to keep it around with some warnings. Heroku's audience is primarily devs who don't want to spend too much time provisioning a server, and having users figure it out on their own goes against that.

FWIW yesterday I got Lounge to work on Heroku. The guide wasn't sufficient. Here's what I had to do (in reverse chronological order): http://pastebin.com/Tnm5hr3j.

Good job! 😄
@dideler, would you like to be maintainer of the Heroku docs? It's unlikely any of the project maintainers will ever fix what's in that document anymore. Unless we have people to maintain this, it will most likely be removed to avoid documenting false information.

I'm not sure if some of those steps are the best approach (e.g. installing dev deps) but they fixed the issues I came across.

Ideally, this document should install versions packaged in npm rather than clone the repo + run npm install && npm run build. That way you would not need to install development dependencies. It's also more stable/official, as the master branch is where development happens, and where things can get broken.

[dideler]

Ideally, this document should install versions packaged in npm rather than clone the repo + run npm install && npm run build. That way you would not need to install development dependencies. It's also more stable/official, as the master branch is where development happens, and where things can get broken.

Agreed this would be ideal, but I'm not sure if it would be possible easy with Heroku. I'll look into it.

I can't commit yet to maintaining the Heroku docs, but if I can figure out a reasonable way to deploy Lounge on Heroku then I'll update the docs. Thanks for the offer :)

[kosmita123]

thanks