Document minimal deployment requirements, e.g. Heroku plan

[nealmcb]

What sort of Heroku plan would be necessary to:

• Just experiment with a single temporary Arlo instance for testing, demos etc?
• Do a pilot audit where security requirements were not emphasized? E.g. the cloud instance could just be available for transparency and public access, and data could be entered in parallel on a separate Arlo instance on a local secure host for more security.
• Would some sort of Heroku plan be suitable for election security? Or are there other options compliant with state-level requirements analogous to FedRamp or whatever?

Presumably Arlo it requires Postgresql support.

What about TLS support. Is it required even just for experimenting / testing / demos?

How much RAM?

Anything else to consider, for the Heroku newbie?

[nealmcb]

Oh, and do you have any simple hints on how to actually deploy on a cloud under any of those scenarios, to get folks started?

[nealmcb]

I guess that perhaps the first part of the answer is already in app.json, which currently lists "addons": [heroku-postgresql:hobby-free"]

I'm trying a free, but "verified" (via credit card) "hobby-free" Heroku account. I manually provisioned postgresql, which I though would happen automatically based on the app.json addons, but didn't (perhaps because I wasn't yet using a verified account?)

Then following the heroku commands in the README.md seemed helpful, and got me pretty far, but I haven't figured out the right blend of configuration options yet, or else am running in to bugs or something. I guess I have to set FLASK_ENV=staging manually, as well as DATABASE_URL, ARLO_HTTP_ORIGIN and ARLO_HTTP_ORIGIN. Then the app starts, but for some reason it tells me it is Running on http://0.0.0.0:58298/. When I visit the app url, I get a 404 not found.

[nealmcb]

Help!

I keep getting a wide variety errors when I try to get Arlo running via Heroku, everything from lack of dependencies that need to be chased down, to errors like sqlalchemy.exc.OperationalError: (psycopg2.OperationalError) FATAL: permission denied for database "postgres" DETAIL: User does not have CONNECT privilege. due to the restrictions in the environment.

But surely it can be made to work, since the DOCKER support was dropped in its favor as noted in #296.

Providing documentation or hints or answers on how to get this running would immeasurably benefit the community's efforts to help you out and improve Arlo for everyone.

[benadida]

fair request, it may take us a bit to get to it, though, we've got an incredibly tight schedule between now and November.

[umbernhard]

@nealmcb for a local instance, we're working on a script to get you up and running here: https://github.com/votingworks/arlo/pull/750

I'm also reviewing the Heroku requirements you're asking for.

[nealmcb]

Thanks for the reference to votingworks/nOAuth: a simple oauth server that does NO real authentication and helps you test systems that depend on OAuth. More convenient than setting real auth servers up e.g. via auth0. And I like your cute new video to warn against running insecure servers ;)

I found the scripts/setup-dev.py code more useful as documentation than as something I could just run, since it assumes particular places and ways of installing the dependencies. So I excerpted pieces out into shell scripts for convenience. Thanks.