Cloudsql-proxy: Start proxy within a Node/Express application, and run on a client in Heroku

[mm-wang]

Is there a way to run the scripts to download the proxy, have Google authentication set up, and begin listening for connections from an application in Heroku with the appropriate credentials? I have an application in Heroku with Express routes that connect to a Google Cloud SQL instance, and I would like to use the cloud_sql_proxy to connect it.

I can run the application locally, starting the proxy locally and listening for events. It seems to me that the proxy needs to run on the same machine/instance as the application, so it would seem to have to run in the cloud with Heroku. If so, how do I set up the proxy invocation to do so? Should it be invoked within Node/Express?

[hfwang]

You will need to do this work yourself, but you can download the proxy and add it to your slug using a custom buildpack. You would then also need to write a script (and use that in your Procfile) that starts both the proxy and the express server together.

A coworker pointed me to heroku's pg-bouncer that uses a very similar strategy, which you can look at: https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-pgbouncer

Sorry that this is pretty convoluted.

[mm-wang]

It was a bit convoluted, but I did get it to work using a specific instantiation of the Procfile using a bash script to download and start the instance.

For others' reference, I used a file called proxy.sh that looks like below:

#!/bin/bash
wget https://dl.google.com/cloudsql/cloud_sql_proxy.linux.386
mv cloud_sql_proxy.linux.386 cloud_sql_proxy
chmod +x cloud_sql_proxy
./cloud_sql_proxy -instances=[instance-name]=tcp:3306 -credential_file=[path-to-file]

and a Procfile that looks like this:

web: (bash ./proxy.sh &) & node start.js

[valentinoli]

This was very helpful. Thank you!

[hfwang]

Thanks for figuring this out!