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Deploy an Elixir or Phoenix application

This markdown summarises the research done on how to deploy a Phoenix application.

PaaS vs VPS

In the past we have mostly used Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers to deploy Elixir applications. The main advantage of PaaS is it is quick to setup and have your application running for your users. However in the longer term using a PaaS can become costly (per unit of compute e.g. RAM/CPU). Virtual Private Server are in contrast normally cheaper to run but require more setup time and DevOps knowledge to maintain.

PaaS

Heroku

We are used to deploy Elixir/Phoenix on Heroku and we have already a "how to" guide of this process.

However there are some limitations when using Heroku with Phoenix (see https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html): image

pricing: image

The pricing above doesn't include the database which needs to be added to the total cost, see https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql

Gigalixir

Similar to Heroku Gigalixir provides a platform which focuses exclusively on deploying Elixir/Phoenix application. Having an exclusive focus on deploying Elixir Apps gives Gigalixir several key advantages:

  1. Zero-downtime blue-green continuous deployment. see: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/BlueGreenDeployment.html
  2. No limit to concurrent connections.
  3. All clustering handled transparently. (so if you need to scale your app beyond 10k concurrent users, you don't have to pay exponentially more for bigger "dynos" the way you are forced to scale vertically on Heroku)

Deploying: https://elixircasts.io/deploying-with-gigalixir-%28revised%29

Pricing:

image

Gigalixir vs Heroku:

image

Like Heroku you need to add the cost for using the database:

image

see also tiers pricing page: https://gigalixir.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tiers-pricing.html

Render

Render is another Paas similar to Heroku

pricing:

image

Virtual Private Server

VPS allow us to manage ourself the deployement setup. This allow us to customise the server and the costs linked to it.

Linode

Ubuntu

Linode provides and support Ubuntu: linode-distribution-options-screen

From there the idea is install Erlang and Elixir on the server and then to run the application.

  • Install Erlang/Elixir with asdf:

    • git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.7.8
    • Edit ~/.bashrc file and add . $HOME/.asdf/asdf.sh and run source ~/.barhrc to access the asdf command
    • Install required pacakges for Erlang sudo apt install libssl-dev make automake autoconf libncurses5-dev gcc
    • Add erlang plugin to asdf: asdf plugin-add erlang
    • Install Erlang: asdf install erlang latest
    • Install Elixir: asdf install elixir latest
    • Define which Elixir version to use asdf global elxir <version>

  • Instsall Nodejs using nvm

  • Clone and run the Phoenix application

    • Clone the application, e.g. git clone https://github.com/dwyl/hits.git
    • Make sure to have all the environemt variables for the application defined
      • e.g. for the secret key: mix phx.gen.secret then export SECRET_KEY_BASE=<secret>
    • Compile assets (see https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/deployment.html#compiling-your-application-assets)
      • npm run deploy --prefix ./assets
      • mix phx.digest
    • Start the server with Mix: MIX_ENV=prod mix phx.server

  • Another way to run the server is to use mix release: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/releases.html

FreeBSD/OpenBSD

I've also been investigating how to run an Elixir/Phoenix applicaiton on FreeBSD (and OpenBSD)

Linode provides a way to create server from image, however the backup system won't support server running FreeBSD: image

The following guide explain how to install FreeBSD on Linode: https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-distros/install-freebsd-on-linode/

I've also tested the installation on one of my machine: https://github.com/SimonLab/FreeBSD-installation

The idea is then to use the FreeBSD package manager to install Elixir and Erlang:

  • pkg install erlang
  • pkg install elixir

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean provides a FreeBSD droplet: image

see https://www.digitalocean.com/products/linux-distribution/freebsd/

However OpenBSD can't be installed directly. There are some way we could install it and investigate if it can be used safely and without any blockers with DigitalOcean: https://dev.to/nabbisen/custom-openbsd-droplet-on-digitalocean-4a9o

see also: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-get-started-with-freebsd

Current Conclusion

After reading and testing some Elixir/Phoenix/Linux/BSD installations I can see that Linode (or similar) can be on a longer term a better tool to manage the applications.

The simple deployement used above with Ubuntu works well, however I still have some research and testing to do especially linked to continuous deployment without downtime. From reading the chapter 11 "Deploy Your Application to Production" of Real Time Phoenix, the solutions to deploy witout downtime are based on running applications on Elixir clusters. I'd like to learn more about this aspect but from a MVP perspective this point might take too much time to assimilate and I think a PaaS might be best to use at the moment.