pingu

Pingu is a tiny little Heroku app pinger that prevents your dynos from falling asleep.

Kinda like that horrible guard guy on Reykjavik airport.

Usage (as a Heroku app)

1. Create a heroku app (with the name of your choice).
2. Clone Pingu and push (deploy) it as that Heroku app.
3. heroku config:set HEROKU_API_KEY=<key> -a <pingu-app-name>
4. Tell pingu to run a dummy node server and loop forever: heroku config:set KEEP_RUNNING=true -a <pingu-app-name>
5. Profit!

You can set the pinging interval via LOOP_INTERVAL env var (set it to ms between pings). It defaults to 30 minutes.

Usage (as a cronjob)

1. Run npm install -g pingu.

2. Create a pingu user.

3. Save your Heroku API token somewhere in pingu user's ${HOME} and make sure you limit access (only make it readable by pingu)! You can source it in your pingu user ~/.bashrc file.

4. Create a Cron job that runs pingu and pass it the Heroku token. Run crontab -e as pingu and add something like:

    */30 * * * * HEROKU_API_KEY=${HEROKU_API_KEY} pingu
   

5. Profit!