ZeroMQ on Heroku

Question

Why doesn't it exist on Heroku?

I want to use Akka and a distributed queues system for actors to communicate on different dynos. RabbitMQ doesn't seem to be the best option using Akka, because a lot of tricks are needed to seamlessly work with actors without concerning about the underlying queues.

Nevertheless, the best option seems to be Durable Mailboxes but with RabbitMQ: akka-amqp-mailbox. I still have to set it up first though.

What other options do you consider that provide a seamless underlying queues system on Heroku with Akka?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use Heroku Vulcan to build and run it yourself. This is what I do whenever I run into something that Heroku doesn't support OOTB. And, "why doesn't it exist"? Because you haven't built it yet! ;-) Good luck.

Answer 2

You can use the official Heroku APT buildpack to install zmq to your Heroku app.

Steps:

1) Add https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-apt as a buildpack. Make sure it is added above/before build packs such as heroku/nodejs so dependencies can be met.

2) Add Aptfile file into the root of your repo with this content:

libzmq3-dbg
libzmq3-dev
libzmq3

3) Deploy