Best deployment guide for a Phoenix API to AWS?

Have you considered nanobox.io? I know they support deploying to AWS and have Elixir / Phoenix as a supported platform: https://guides.nanobox.io/elixir/phoenix/

Maybe GitHub - bitwalker/distillery-aws-example: An example application to go with the AWS guide in the Distillery documentation · GitHub for Deploying To AWS - Distillery Documentation

That guide is so broken that I just stopped following it.

This is the one I’m doing now:

https://cloud.google.com/community/tutorials/elixir-phoenix-on-kubernetes-google-container-engine

It works great so far, the only part I’m confused on is where I define my environment variables so that REPLACE_OS_VARS from distillery can replace them. I’m assuming its not when i package the release, but after.

You can set REPLACE_OS_VARS in a pre configure hook.

As for the distillery guide, it wasn’t broken at all when I followed it a few months ago.

Hmm weird. I encountered like 3 or 4 places that I fixed easily enough but it didn’t give me confidence in the guide. ultimately I stopped though because I didnt want to depend on amazon blackbox services which Ive had experience with before. Granted, my current method deals with Google blackbox services but I trust those more for some reason.

If you look at that link you will see REPLACE_OS_VARS in the docker image, so I basically do this (all the environment variables at this point look like "${THIS_FORMAT}":

MIX_ENV=prod mix release --env=prod

At this point I can do:

REPLACE_OS_VARS=true MIX_ENV=prod DATABASE_NAME=... REDIS_URL=... _build/whatever/whatever foreground

and it works…

Then

docker build --no-cache -t hello .

I can see in their docker image they have REPLACE_OS_VARS I’m just wondering where they fit in AFTER release but before docker build? Can you explain what you mean by pre-configure hook?

Also as a side question. One thing I found really strange was that I could mix release with your standard "${VAR_HERE}".. and then when i would RUN the release with REPLACE_OS_VARS=true ... foreground it would work! This part I dont understand, how does the app know AT RUN TIME to replace the variables? Is that some code distilierry injects into my app to make it know to do that at run time rather than at compile time?

Oh I see, its in the deploy scripts in _build/prod/rel/app/lib/

clever

You can set REPLACE_OS_VARS just before running the app. It’s being deprecated in favor of config providers, though.

See Runtime Configuration - Distillery Documentation for more.

Can you explain what you mean by pre-configure hook?

Damn well this looks super confusing. I’ll have to get docker running start to finish first then ill figure out how to do that.

How might I do that with this current strategy I’m doing, can you give me an examle of a single variable and where I put it so I don’t have to read all that (for now)

Let’s say you have something like

config :app, db_path: "${DB_PATH}"

in your config.exs somewhere.

To make it replaceable at runtime, you’d need to set REPLACE_OS_VARS before starting the release. One way to do it is in a pre configure hook.

Oh I’m talking about doing away with this method “${DB_PATH}” and REPLACE_OS_VARS and just doing it the proper way with config providers

im actually just reading now to see how to do it