Web process on Heroku idles and shuts down

The connect middleware API requires a web process on heroku to bind to a port, but the process shuts down when it idles, which means hubot dies.

2012-01-31T18:08:56+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to up
2012-01-31T19:16:33+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Idling
2012-01-31T19:16:36+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from up to down
2012-01-31T19:16:39+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Stopping process with SIGTERM
2012-01-31T19:16:39+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Process exited
2012-02-01T08:16:39+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Unidling
2012-02-01T08:16:39+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from down to created
2012-02-01T08:16:39+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from created to starting
2012-02-01T08:16:43+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command `bin/hubot -a campfire -n hubot`

From the heroku docs:

What is dyno idling?
Apps that have only 1 web dyno will be idled out after a period of inactivity.
The web dyno will be shut down. When a request comes in to an idled app your
web dyno will be automatically spun back up, causing a few second delay for
this first request. Subsequent requests will perform normally.

Apps that have more than 1 web dyno are never idled out. Workers dynos are
never idled out.

[jakeasmith]

Another solution was referenced here - https://github.com/github/hubot/issues/366#issuecomment-10615132

“If you’re not using a web interface for this process, rename the web process in the procfile to something else, like “hubot”. Processes not named “web” don’t get idled.”

[dkador]

Yup, totally my fault.