Nanbox dev and deployment support about amber

[ylluminate]

Agreed @elorest. Options make things better and we don't need to "align" ourselves on sides (look where that party system has gotten us in the US as far as forgetting about real issues and making too many things about the "platform" and it causes some usually smart ppl like DHH to ignore superb and very important projects like Opal). Heroku can be great, but frankly it's a bit too expensive for a lot of us who are just getting apps up in the bootstrapping process. Given that Nanobox is compatible with bootstrappers AND scales is a big win any which way you slice it, so yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works for my Ruby and Crystal apps.

[mixflame]

hey @ylluminate I left some info in there to help you guys out. If I missed anything, hopefully the team will be able to back me up, I gave them the link in Gitter. Thanks for helping push Crystal and Amber to production! - Jon

[elorest]

Did you post this on the main crystal channel as well? I will if you haven't.

[eliasjpr]

An update was posted in Trello (https://trello.com/c/belEWLqo/60-crystal) by Nanobox @danielhunsaker1 to add support for Crystal to their platform. I was wondering if someone can provide them with an answer or at least respond. Currently, we are tracking this issue on Amber, I think that the Amber repo is the wrong place for this type of issue since is more related to crystal tooling than the framework itself and maybe should be posted on the https://github.com/crystal-lang-tools/ repo

[ylluminate]

Hey @mixflame I'm not associated in any way with Nanobox. I simply had a conversation with Tyler who expressed interest in supporting Crystal and asked for input on how to do it... and if it gets enough votes, they'll implement it! :)

So this is just my effort to help push things along for the great work that everyone's doing with Amber and Crystal.

One thing that might cause them concern is that they only support 2GB production "nanoboxes", however that might not be an issue since I would think the "nanobox" would be compiled created on the development platform vs the production.

[mixflame]

Oh ok. I didn't know about that company. I am just looking now. I hope they do implement it, it is a very fun language.

About the compiling on development and pushing production. In theory it should work. I have tried it and got errors about my libmongoc.so missing (my app uses mongo.cr and by extension MongoDB). I'm not super great with Linux itself and I tried to install that driver and failed. Because in Debian 8 libmongoc package doesn't exist. So it should still be possible if the package exists. In Debian 9 I ran into an incompatibility with OpenSSL which is documented now in Crystal. That's why I gave the Ubuntu suggestion (from @elorest). 2GB is more than enough to run the program, simply just not compile. Crystal is very fast and has low memory usage, so it should be more than perfect for a (cloud?) host like NanoBox.

Thanks for joining Crystal community! :D 🍕

Edit: Now I just read up on them (https://nanobox.io/heroku-alternative/), seems like a really cool idea! I already use Linode as well. If the support is good, could be very helpful! It is a manual setup there now.

[ylluminate]

@elorest I mentioned it on Crystal's gitter, but it didn't have too warm of a reception. Looks like Amber folks are the catalyst! The main reason I think they did not really hop onboard is that they didn't see the value right away vs Heroku, etc. Aside from some very serious dev-ops benefits that I see, I think they missed the idea that this is a great opportunity for "marketing" for Cr as well. 🤷‍♂️

So yeah, feel free to push it along all you like!

[elorest]

Hmmm Oh well. Heroku has a great team but I don't really like the locked down solution. Nanobox might be the same way but more variety is great.

[mixflame]

I'm sure he knows Opal is cool and is just pandering to Coffee/JS extremists on the frontend. But I'm just guessing. Haha

[ylluminate]

No you're actually right @mixflame (on multiple counts). He's proverbially in bed with some guys that won't let him pull out w/o serious ramifications. (He actually remarked on Opal at one point and was very interested in it's support of ActiveSupport.) It's truly sad and then those on the extremist side have really done their hitlerian jobs at burning things down. Lots of sad interactions you can see if you've followed their scene over the last few years. Hopefully folks understand that technology can be objective and not so emotionally loaded. 🤔

[mixflame]

Totally agreed. Luckily I don't follow the scene and just love and use Ruby/Crystal haha 😆

[mixflame]

It's only a matter of time before Opal is one of the standard interpreters probably

[ylluminate]

Refer to Issue #343 now on this since things are moving forward.