Elixir Deployment Options

Found this through a Google search, did this ever get implemented on Gigalixir?

Note, I did find this: GitHub - Main-Proxy/main_proxy · GitHub
Which implies that this is the proposed solution.

The way I describe Heroku for Elixir is simply, just because Elixir has a feature doesn’t mean you have to use the feature. Basically the simple web app use case where the in memory stuff is really just caching and you can use the Redis adapter for channels.

Eventually, people will outgrow it but it’s pretty good for people just starting out. My blog still runs on the $7 hobby dyno with the free shared database and its survived a couple of hacker news front pages.

Aiven looks good to.

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Heroku doesn’t support certain features in Elixir which I think prevents the language from doing many of the things that set it apart from other languages, to be more specific Deploying on Heroku — Phoenix v1.8.8 states that: Connections are limited, Distributed clustering is not possible, In-memory state such as those in Agents, GenServers, and ETS will be lost every 24 hours, and lastly Remote shells and remote observer are not possible. Because of these things I personally would prefer running my own nodes.

Most Elixir applications won’t get to the point multiple servers are needed and can be load balanced across a few very nodes. DigitalOcean has a 32 CPU Server with 64 GB of RAM one or two of those behind a load balancer should be more than enough for even the most demanding of applications.

Another Heroku-like with support for Elixir: Deploying Elixir, Phoenix apps on NodeChef - A complete step by step guide.

If you only have a few apps that aren’t being used 24/7 Heroku is often free. (I.e. you don’t need to pay for extra hours).

I prefer to use full-access VPS’s as opposed to things like Gigalixir/Nanobox/Heroku or any of those services. The reason is that even though there’s a lot more setup involved initially, once you have your app setup for deployment it’s usually pretty easy and quick from there on out.

Doing it in this way allows you to easily move from one provider to another if needed. Otherwise, you would have to extract certain deployment fragments from your Gigalixir/Heroku/other service configuration and then set the rest up manually anyway.

Also, I want the fine grained control over each component of my app, while still being able to run multiple apps on the same server, which most of those services don’t give you.

I personally use DigitalOcean as my provider and I use a $20/mo VPS. DO recently changed their pricing to match Linode/Vultr and the other guys so DO’s pricing is actually the same now where it lagged behind before.

I deploy my apps inside Docker only, so that everything is modular and I can add/remove/swap out different components of different apps at will, which is important to me since I have many apps to run on the same server.

If you want to see the comprehensive guide on how I setup my deployments, you can check it out on my forum thread.

P.S. Nothing against Gigalixir at all, they have a wonderful service and it makes everything way easier if you know you don’t need portability later, but this doesn’t really fit my use case, and I like using raw servers personally. Also, jesse is an awesome guy and I see him all over the place in relation to Elixir things so with Gigalixir you are in really good hands.

One possibility is to just point both of those subdomains at your gigalixir app. You’d run something like

gigalixir add_domain myapp api.myapp.com
gigalixir add_domain myapp frontend.myapp.com

Then update the DNS records for both subdomains. More details on setting up a custom domain here:

That should work, but it also might mean that frontend.myapp.com will respond to api requests unless you block it yourself.

We’re currently looking into implementing a way for a single umbrella app to listen on multiple ports. Not sure when that’ll be available though or what it’ll look like.

Hey @jesse, is there any documentation about setting up front-end services as subdomains?

Use case: I’d like to use Phoenix 1.3 on the back end at api.myapp.com, and have an elm client hosted on the same server, at frontend.myapp.com.

Hey @markdev, founder of gigalixir.com here in case you have any questions.