What's a buildpack?
The concept of buildpack was introduced by Heroku. It is a simple API to define what needs to be done to generate a self-contained version of an application, ready to be deployed. You can find more about the Buildpack API by following this link.
A buildpack has three parts:
a detection step, where the buildpack attempts to find out whether it can process the application (e.g. the Ruby buildpack checks whether a
Gemfileexists, among other things).a compilation step, where the buildpack will download dependencies, launch tasks, and generally make everything needed to "compile" the application into a self-contained artefact.
a release step, which is used to set environment variables and various other things needed by the application to run.
Officially supported buildpacks
| Language | URL |
|---|---|
| Ruby | https://github.com/pkgr/heroku-buildpack-ruby#universal |
| NodeJS | https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs#v58 |
| Go | https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-go#master |
Custom buildpacks
One of the benefits of having a well-defined buildpack API is that you can create one yourself, and use it as the source buildpack for your application (see Customizing the build).
For instance, although C++ applications are not yet officially supported, you could create a buildpack that adds the necessary steps to compile the code and declare the relevant process types.