One of the benefits of buildpacks is that they are multi-process - an image can have multiple entrypoints for each operational mode. Let’s see how this works. We will extend our app to have a worker process.
Let’s create a worker file, ruby-sample-app/worker.rb, with the following contents:
for i in 0..5
puts "Running a worker task..."
end
After building our app, we could run the resulting image with the web process (currently the default) or our new worker process.
To enable running the worker process, we’ll need to have our buildpack define a “process type” for the worker. Modify the section where processes are defined to:
# ...
cat > "$layersdir/launch.toml" << EOL
# our web process
[[processes]]
type = "web"
command = "bundle exec ruby app.rb"
default = true
# our worker process
[[processes]]
type = "worker"
command = "bundle exec ruby worker.rb"
EOL
# ...
Your full ruby-buildpack/bin/build script should now look like the following:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eo pipefail
echo "---> Ruby Buildpack"
# 1. GET ARGS
layersdir=$1
# 2. CREATE THE LAYER DIRECTORY
rubylayer="$layersdir"/ruby
mkdir -p "$rubylayer"
# 3. DOWNLOAD RUBY
echo "---> Downloading and extracting Ruby"
ruby_url=https://s3-external-1.amazonaws.com/heroku-buildpack-ruby/heroku-22/ruby-3.1.3.tgz
wget -q -O - "$ruby_url" | tar -xzf - -C "$rubylayer"
# 4. MAKE RUBY AVAILABLE DURING LAUNCH
echo -e '[types]\nlaunch = true' > "$layersdir/ruby.toml"
# 5. MAKE RUBY AVAILABLE TO THIS SCRIPT
export PATH="$rubylayer"/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:}"$rubylayer/lib"
# 6. INSTALL GEMS
echo "---> Installing gems"
bundle install
# ========== MODIFIED ===========
# 7. SET DEFAULT START COMMAND
cat > "$layersdir/launch.toml" << EOL
# our web process
[[processes]]
type = "web"
command = "bundle exec ruby app.rb"
default = true
# our worker process
[[processes]]
type = "worker"
command = "bundle exec ruby worker.rb"
EOL
Now if you rebuild your app using the updated buildpack:
pack build test-ruby-app --path ./ruby-sample-app --buildpack ./ruby-buildpack
You should then be able to run your new Ruby worker process:
docker run --rm --entrypoint worker test-ruby-app
and see the worker log output:
Running a worker task...
Running a worker task...
Running a worker task...
Running a worker task...
Running a worker task...
Running a worker task...
Next, we’ll look at how to improve our buildpack by leveraging cache.