How to blend a rock-solid CMS and API with the absolute best in front-end tooling, built as a single project and hosted seamlessly on Heroku.

Rails is an incredible framework, but modern web development has moved to the front-end, meaning sometimes you don’t need all the bulk of the asset pipeline and the templating system. In Rails 5 you can now create an API-only Rails app, meaning you can build your front-end however you like—using Create React App, for example. It’s no longer 100% omakase.

Asynchronous provisioning allows add-ons to perform out-of-band provisioning in a first-class way. It’s intended for add-on services that need extended time to set up and help make automated app setup and orchestration easier and less error-prone.

The customer will be billed as soon as the add-on starts provisioning. This means the time and cost of provisioning your service is accounted for in how much a customer pays. As such, you should make every effort to provision expediently so customers get value from your service as quickly as possible.

Add-ons that take longer than 12 hours to provision (or those your service fails to mark as “provisioned” via the API in that time period) will be...

Need to quickly catch up on this past quarter's announcements? Here are the top three topics to tune in on:

The Platform API for Partners provides many official endpoints that allow you to introspect security settings, discover other customer instances of the same add-on, and much more. With the Platform API, add-ons have an OAuth client secret and a number of OAuth authorizations, one token per provisioned add-on; it is only used to authenticate requests to create the scoped tokens and not used to authenticate other requests to the Platform API.

Updated password requirements for the add-on manifest go into effect as of December 15, 2017. Add-on manifest password values are required...

The Platform API for Partners provides many official endpoints that the App Info API doesn’t support. These endpoints let you introspect security settings, discover other customer instances of the same add-on, and much more. Platform API for Partners endpoints are also more consistent and “better traveled.” Heroku uses these endpoints internally, and customers also use them directly.

With the Platform API, add-ons have an OAuth client secret and a number of OAuth authorizations, one token per provisioned add-on. The OAuth client secret is only used to authenticate requests to create the scoped tokens; it is not used to authenticate other requests to the Platform API.

All new add-ons that...

The following is the story of how Randall Degges created a simple API to solve the common problem of external IP address lookup and how he scaled it from zero to over 10 thousand requests per second (30B/month!) using Node.js and Go on Heroku.

Several years ago I created a free web service, ipify. It is a highly scalable IP address lookup service. When you make a GET request against it, it returns your public-facing IP address. Try it out yourself!

I created ipify because, at the time, I was building complex infrastructure...