Running Heroku background tasks with only 1 web dyno and 0 worker dynos

Question

I have a Python Flask app on Heroku that serves web pages but also allows certain tasks to be launched which I believe would be best structured as background tasks. As such

Answer 1

You could use a process manager such as god or monit.

With god, you can set up your configuration like so

God.watch do |w|
  w.name = "app"
  w.start = "python app.py"
  w.keepalive
end

God.watch do |w|
  w.name = "worker"
  w.start = "python worker.py"
  w.keepalive
end

Then you put this in your Procfile

god -c path/to/config.god -D

By default, it automatically restarts the process if it crashes, and you can configure it to restart the app if memory usage gets too high. Check out the documentation.