Deploy! Makahiki on Heroku!

Finishing Makahiki installation locally, and some hours later after setting up my VirtualBox with more space, it was time to tackle Makahiki on Heroku, the online app platform. Feel free to follow along here. 

First off, if it wasn't clear (I had not seen it specified in the instructions, it is very important that you have fully done the local set up for Makahiki. While it should be obvious from the fact that we are doing 2.1.1.2, regardless several of the steps require you are either already familiar with setting up the environment and configuration or have already previously done so, as factors like setting up the virtualenv, installing requirements, are already assumed practices. It might be important to remind people about the key things they'll need for 2.1.1.1 for this to avoid possible confusion for people who wish to jump into Heroku usage without testing out things locally.

It was very helpful to point out the need for credit cards in this instance, and comforting to know that they won't charge you right away for use of the Heroku or Amazon S3 system, yet one should still be cautious about what they do to prevent any kind of charges if they don't wish to see them. This can also be slightly problematic if the systems are unresponsive as any possible important information transfer can be an issue (at the time Amazon was not connecting consistently for confirming my authentication for S3).

Small issues occurred regarding limitations to the system. When creating a bucket (2.1.1.2.4) It was made clear that I needed one for the upcoming transfer of media files from the project, but did not specify any limitations. This lead to me using "Camel Type" in naming my bucket, which later caused a problem with uploading and require making another bucket properly all in lowercase. This should have been something I considered initially, but with no warning about it, and Amazon S3's acceptance of the form factor I had let it go.

Initializing Makahiki (2.1.1.2.7) required extra steps by running pip install -r requirements.txt in the first level makahiki folder in order to prevent problems with initialization. This step is mostly a time sync because problems can be easily missed as text is shown and contact with Amazon and Heroku are hastily done to put your project online. The first time I uploaded, not realizing the problem with the bucket I was given errors without realizing and didn't notice until trying to access the Makahiki installation after.

The problems were small but many, and clarity is often what created the issue, as steps were either not explicitly stated. Even then, it is hard to say what the major problem was in this installation.

4hours later

We had game!

I have not had any prior cloud experience, so I cannot judge the difficulty of this work in regards to that, but it is an exercise that requires some care and observation to go over smoothly.

Between this exercise and the one before it (with the reconfiguration of my virtualbox imbetween) I was actively working for several hours. Even then, the major time sinks were either out of my control (Internet issues with upload and download), or issues on my part (needing to reread exercises, signing up for the extra services required, and having to repartition and expand my virtual drive). In total, I believe it was about 6 hours for the tutorial exercise itself, with a couple of hours of outside research and several hours of maintenance.

A lesson to be learned, if not learned before, always beware the unexpected!