Heroku Updates and Possible Alternatives

[mattodd]

The landing page at http://opensourcemalaria.org/ is created by a little app that pulls content from Github. The attraction of this is that we can all add things to Github and have that appear on a webpage, rather than rely on someone manually updating the page. (The mechanics of this is what this repo is all about, hence this Issue being in this repo).

The app sits on a "Heroku server". This has been, to date, maintained by CloudCity, the lovely people who created all this in the first place, headed up by Stephanie Geerlings. They've recently been paying the bills for this hosting, which has got to stop.
I had a call with Cloudcity to clarify next steps. They (Andre Arko, @indirect ) have very kindly switched our app from an old server to the new Heroku server (as I was on the call, amazingly). What needs to happen now is that we create a Heroku "organisation" for OSM, with OSM's associated email address (opensourcemalaria@gmail.com) (here, I think), and we use this as the Admin account to take care of billing etc via creation of a team (here, I think)

um @edwintse might you be able to carry out these two steps? You're faster at this than me.

This will allow us to maintain things as they are in a holding pattern, but taking control of the billing.

Future

1. We may want to tweak the app. We can do that, to alter how the webpage looks. I don't know how to do that, but we can do it.
2. We may want to clone the app to serve other open source drug orgs, such as mycetoma or antibiotics (there was one for TB, but it's dormant, which is why the landing page opensourcetb.org looks out of date)
3. we may want to think about alternatives, such as Github Pages, which essentially does something similar. Andre kindly offered some light support if we decide to go down that route, which is very kind.
4. OSM, generally, is still not an organisation. We may want to make it into a non-profit, which is a subject we occasionally return to. This would allow donations, etc, but brings with it accounting requirements.

Thoughts welcome. Volunteers to help with some of this welcomer.

[miike]

I'm happy to help out with this if needed. Github recently sent me a notification that they are deprecating some of the functionality that the current site uses to pull in information from Github so that could likely do with an update as well.

We could put this on Heroku if required - but if it's just a static site (not sure how much Heroku costs at the moment?) we could entertain other cloud providers as well. Depending on the NFP status of OSM we could very likely get some free credits from most of the major cloud providers GCP (Google) or AWS (Amazon), I'm happy to reach out to contacts at either cloud here if needed.

[indirect]

@miike the Heroku app is basically a JSON remixer—makes a few GitHub API calls and combines into a live feed for the static site to display via JS. It's $7/mo right now, so my assessment is that merely trying to move it to a different provider would cost more than paying for the app directly for the next few years. 👍🏻

[miike]

@miike the Heroku app is basically a JSON remixer—makes a few GitHub API calls and combines into a live feed for the static site to display via JS. It's $7/mo right now, so my assessment is that merely trying to move it to a different provider would cost more than paying for the app directly for the next few years. 👍🏻

Thanks @indirect - sounds like that's the way to go then short term. @mattodd I should be able to move this over reasonably easy without any issues, sounds like a small task.