OmbuLabs Blog

Be it for our own internal tooling or on our client’s projects, we’ve used a variety of package managers. When building our newest tool, we decided to try out the uv package manager that’s been talked about a lot.

One problem with that, though, is that lack of support for uv in Heroku’s Python buildpacks. There’s an issue open in the Heroku roadmap to support it, but it is not supported yet.

We weren’t going to let that little hiccup stop us from using uv though. Inspired by the python-poetry-buildpack, we built our own little heroku-uv-buildpack that allowed us to deploy our application to Heroku.

At OmbuLabs, we have some projects where multiple teams work at the same time on different features or fixes. We started using Heroku’s Review Apps because we kept running into blockers when a team needed to deploy a branch to our staging server but another team was using it.

There are two configurations in Heroku to create Review Apps: manual and automatic. A manual creation gives us more control, but not every person involved in the QA process has access to the Heroku pipeline. So, for many months, we used the automatic Review App creation every time a PR was created/updated. This was an easy workaround, but there’s one problem, the Review Apps for Heroku Teams can’t use free dynos, so we were being charged for Review Apps that were created before they were actually needed or even for PRs that didn’t really need a Review App at all.

We started looking for an easy way to control the creation and deletion of Review Apps that can be triggered by anyone directly from the GitHub PR and here are the details and how we do this now.

Recently at OmbuLabs I had the mission of setting up Heroku Review Apps for one of our projects. Since the project is built in a multi-tenant architecture (using the apartment gem) it was a bit challenging to setup.