Nicd
I recently got an ARM laptop to replace my old amd64 one. This poses a problem for me. I run my production service on an amd64 VPS (Hetzner) that runs Ubuntu Server.
Thus far I’ve used a Vagrant box with Ubuntu to build a release in, and then uploaded that release to my production server, unpacked it, and restarted (it’s quite manual, yes, but I don’t release often). Now, of course, due to NIFs such as Comeonin and AppSignal, I cannot build on ARM.
How have you typically handled this? I found some earlier threads suggesting the use of Docker or building the release on GitHub (I use GitLab though):
- Is creating the Elixir release on arm Macbook M1 a problem when uploading that to an intel architecture Ubuntu server?
- How to cross-release and upgrade?
Is this still the way to go? I have tried Burrito earlier, but I could not get it to build the release correctly (problem with NIFs).
I know nowadays I could run an ARM VM with amd64 binaries inside using Rosetta 2, but I don’t know how big of a hassle it would be.
One thought was GitLab CI, I guess I could use that to build a release out of every push to some branch? Could I get it to match the Ubuntu environment closely enough so that it would work? Though, I’m on a free account so I don’t know how much processing it allows me to do.
Where Next?
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l3nz
I use an integration server that runs x86 and that does the build. But you could also buy a $4 x86 VM, rsync your project tree to it, and do a “mix release” - I also do that sometimes.
tcoopman
Building on an other server, gitlab or GitHub are definitely options, but what they’re probably doing is building on docker. That’s what I would suggest. Docker seems like a good option.
Nicd
A $4 VM would increase my monthly costs by 20%.
I guess I’ll look into doing it in GitLab CI. Thanks!
I thought Docker is just a virtualization environment, and thus I couldn’t run amd64 containers on ARM unless I went through something like QEMU which would be deadly slow, right?
tcoopman
I think it use QEMU in the back yes, if it’s dealy slow I have no idea. I think that’s something you need to test for yourself.
Anyway if it’s just for building the release, I can’t imagine that even a 2-5x times slowdown is a deal breaker?
l3nz
We use Hetzner too. With their CLI tool, you can deploy a new VM, install OTP, rsync your program, release, download, shutdown and you’d incur in 15 minutes of usage total… so just a few € cents.
mayel
Check out https://getutm.app (which builds on qemu) for running OSs with different architectures on Silicon. But really the easiest is using CI for that, especially if building x86 which those services tend to run on (I use CI for x86 builds but actually also build releases on my Mac to deploy to ARM servers since that takes minutes instead of 1+ hour on CI which uses qemu for it, tbf a lot of the slowness may be due to Rust NIFs rather than the elixir build though)…
c4710n
From the tags of this post, I guess you are using Apple M1.
I’m using Apple M1, too. And I has the same requirement of deploying to x86_64 machines.
My solution:
EDIT: After I wrote this, I found @mayel had already wrote something about it.
musialny.dev
Use docker multi arch containers. Setup amd64 and build app inside it
mayel
@c4710n I’m curious how slow? I’ve seen how slow emulating ARM on x86 is (using github actions specifically) but haven’t actually tested building a release for x86 emulated on ARM.
c4710n
In my case, I’m using:
When building x86_64 docker image, I use above docker service.
On my MBP 2015, the build can be done in 4 min. But in the emulator on MBP 2021, the building process can slow 4 times, I think. (I didn’t measure it precisely. All I know is that my tea will be cold after the build.
)