Over the past decade, millions of developers have interacted with the Heroku CLI. In those 10 years, the CLI has gone through many changes. We've changed languages several times; redesigned the plugin architecture; and improved test coverage and the test framework. What follows is the story of our team's journey to build and maintain the Heroku CLI from the early days of Heroku to today.

1. Ruby (CLI v1-v3)
2. Go/Node (CLI v4)
3. Go/Node (CLI v5)
4. Pure Node (CLI v6)
5. What's Next?

Ruby (CLI v1-v3)

Our original CLI (v1-v3) was written in Ruby and served us well for many years. Ruby is a great, expressive language for building CLIs, however, we started experiencing enough problems that...

It’s been a little over a year since our last Happy Node Hackers post, and even in such a short time much has changed and some powerful new tools have been released. The Node.js ecosystem continues to mature and new best practices have emerged.

Here are 8 habits for happy Node hackers updated for 2017. They're specifically for app developers, rather than module authors, since those groups have different goals and constraints:

Choices are an important part of a healthy open source software community. That’s why we’re excited about Yarn, a new package manager that addresses many of the problems with Node’s default package manager, npm. While npm has done a fantastic job creating a large and vibrant JavaScript ecosystem, I want to share why Yarn is an important addition to the Node.js ecosystem, how it will improve your Node.js development experience, and how Heroku has incorporated it into the build process for your Heroku apps.

We began testing Yarn almost immediately after it was released, and began fully supporting it on December 16.

About Yarn

Yarn was released in October 2016 and made a big splash...

Today we are announcing the newest version of the Heroku CLI. We know how much time you spend in the CLI as developers and how much pride you take in being able to get things done quickly. Our new CLI has big improvements in performance as well as enhanced readability for humans and machines.

Tuned for Performance

CLI response time is made up of two parts: the API response time and the performance of the CLI itself, and the latter is where we’ve made big improvements. While a typical Unix user should experience responses that are around half a second faster, the biggest gains are for Windows users, as the new CLI no longer has a Ruby wrapper.

When we measured the time it takes for the...

So you want to build an app with React? "Getting started" is easy… and then what?

React is a library for building user interfaces, which comprise only one part of an app. Deciding on all the other parts — styles, routers, npm modules, ES6 code, bundling and more — and then figuring out how to use them is a drain on developers. This has become known as javascript fatigue. Despite this complexity, usage of React continues to grow.

The community answers this challenge by sharing boilerplates. These boilerplates reveal the profusion of architectural choices developers must make. That official "Getting Started" seems so far away from the reality of an operational app.