Setup to develop using elixir

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Background

Recently I took upon a personal project to help someone very close to me. This project will be done in Elixir, but there is an issue - the machines I have access to are not strong enough to have a Linux VM (via VirtualBox or VMWare) on top of their installation and run Elixir.

I mention a VM, because I don’t want to install Elixir on the host, which most likely won’t even be my machine.

Options

The first thing that jumped to my mind was to use a cloud provider. However I have to pay them a monthly fee and I don’t feel comfortable with that idea.

The other option I can think of is using Docker. I have read some articles where people mention developer images for Elixir programmers. Ideally, I would be able to have all my code and environment in a docker image and then use an online editor to code and do the work.

Questions

But I have no experience with docker images for development. So naturally I have some questions:

what is your current setup for developing elixir?
Do you use a docker image for development?
Do you install things directly into your machine?
Do you recommend any cloud provider or online IDE that I could try?

13 comments

#docker #development #environment

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2019-12-09 13:34:52 UTC

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NobbZ

What operating system is your host driven by? If it’s not Linux, you’ll end up installing a VM which runs the docker anyway…

Post #1

eahanson

I do my elixir work directly on macOS, but I also work on a larger JVM-based project and we decided to do development on Google Cloud Platform.

We spin up a preemptible instance whenever we want to do work and use Mutagen to sync local files to the remote machine and to forward ports. We then edit files locally and use local web browsers to hit the local ports which get forwarded to the remote machine. An ansible script for setup and few simple bash scripts for starting and stopping everything keeps it all pretty simple.

A 4 CPU machine with 15GB RAM is USD$0.04 per hour (pro-rated to the minute and only accruing charges when the machine is running) which is pretty cheap especially if you’re not going to be using it 24x7. Google might choose to shut your machine down if they need it back (that’s the preemptible part, and the reason why it’s only 20% the price of a regular server) but because all of our work is written to our local disk before being synced up to the remote machine, there’s no risk of data loss.

Post #3

NobbZ

Docker is not a VM!

But it runs in a linux VM if your host system is windows.

If you use docker4windows then the MS hypervisor is used, it will allocate the necessary memory for the VM on creation, and even if enough is available in the system, chance is that creation of the machine will fail. I had a lot of trouble using it. It never properly worked for me.

Docker Toolbox though uses VirtualBox and memory for the VM is allocated in a more host friendly way, and in general my experience using it was much better than with docker4windows.

So, your best bet is probably USB-boot into a Linux2Go.

This also solves your “I don’t want to install anything” problem.

Post #5

Last Post!

Asimov

You can use the smallest instance at vultr {dot} com. it gives you 512MB Memory and one CPU. At USD 2.50 a month, it is hard to beat. You have your environmente ready in no more than 10 min. I think Digital Ocean has simmilar offers.

Post #13