Facebook and Heroku
by Adam - Sep 15, 2011
We're delighted to announce that Facebook and Heroku have teamed up to bring you the fastest and easiest way to get your own Facebook app up and running in the cloud.
Facebook apps have long been a major segment on the Heroku platform. From scrappy startups like Cardinal Blue to Hollywood giants like Warner Brothers, Heroku's scale-out capabilities and friction-free workflow enables these innovative companies to easily deliver great social experiences. Now, Facebook has created a fantastic new way to start building a live Facebook app instantly, powered by Heroku.
A Quick Tour
Start by going to Facebook Developers. Click Create New App and then Cloud Services → Get Started. A captcha and a button press later, and you've got your very own Facebook app running on Heroku! You can git clone the app to start working on it immediately.
This screencast tells the full story:
Detailed instructions available in Getting Started With Your Facebook App on Heroku.
Polyglot Support
Heroku is a polyglot platform, so we're offering support for the languages that Facebook developers are most likely to use. Apps are created from one of four templates, based on the language choice you make at app creation time: Ruby, Node.js, Python, or PHP.
As part of this launch, we're including partial support for two new languages: Python and PHP. For now, these languages are only supported for apps created through the Facebook integration.
What This Means
Facebook wanted to make their new app creation process smooth and easy, and knew that they needed to embrace the cloud to do so. As the world's most mature and powerful cloud application platform, Heroku was the obvious choice.
Our two companies share many product and engineering values, and our teams had a blast working on this together. Our goals were to deliver an integration that:
- Avoids superfluous steps, like account signup or cutting-and-pasting of config values.
- Focuses on apps, not servers. When your Facebook app suddenly gets big traffic, the last thing you should be doing is thinking about servers: you need instant scaling.
- Gets you an app running instantly. Who wants to wait around for minutes while their app "provisions"?
- Doesn't force you to make up-front decisions about cost. You don't need a credit card to get started, and low-volume apps on Heroku are free forever.
For all of the above reasons and more, we believe this makes Facebook and Heroku the perfect combination.
Next Steps
Log in to your Facebook account and visit Facebook Developers to get started.
Further reading: