exec and PATH on heroku with buildpacks

Question

I use this buildpack in order to use casperjs on heroku.

Once my app created, I check my PATH

$ heroku config:get PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/app/vendor/phantomjs/bin:/app/vendor/casperjs/bin

OK, casperjs is in here!

--

Procfile

scraper: node scraper.js

scraper.js

var exec = require('child_process').exec;
exec('casperjs casper-script.js');

--

But when I launch the scraper process, it crashes with the following logs:

2012-10-09T02:23:38+00:00 heroku[scraper.1]: Starting process with command `node scraper.js`
2012-10-09T02:23:39+00:00 app[scraper.1]: bash: node: command not found

---

Why exec does not find casperjs which is in the PATH ?

PS: I tried with spawn but no more luck...

[EDIT]: a testable gist here https://gist.github.com/3856317

Answer 1

Got it!

@vinayr: you were right, neither exec nor casperjs command was involved in this issue, it was node which was the command not found!

I thought installing a buildpack with phantomjs and casperjs (eg: heroku-buildpack-casperjs) would have kept node capabilities for my app, but it does not seem so.

To make it work (node+phantomjs+casperjs) I rather had to fork the heroku-buildpack-nodejs buildpack and add phantomjs/casperjs binaries to it, which I could have called: heroku-buildpack-nodejs-casperjs.

In other words, when using a custom buildpack, you have to include the node support yourself .