Dear all,
Please help me, how to deploy phoenix application into VPS like Digital Ocean or Vultr or Linode or OVH cloud, I have searching through Google but nothing found fit to me
Hi @ariandanim, can you share some of the posts you have seen and help us understand what doesn’t fit?
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Have you tried Introduction to Deployment — Phoenix v1.6.12? it has step by step instructions for three different hosting solutions.
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The end of the “Releases” documentation has an example dockerfile Deploying with Releases — Phoenix v1.6.12.
Also see mix help phx.gen.release and mix phx.gen.release --docker.
You can get quite far with a docker-compose file. The only issue is getting your container image upstream which has a few options:
-
docker/podman save,scpanddocker/podman load. - Push your container to a hosted registry (docker, quay, github, google all provide free hosting, at least for public images).
- Run a registry yourself, which is quite easy (there is a container for it!). You can run this bound to localhost only and push images over an ssh tunnel to simplify auth for small-scale deployments or run it on a protected network interface with a auth wrapper for multi-host systems, or expose it to the world if you’re into that kind of thing.
The save-load method is simple, it just has to copy the whole thing every time, vs a registry that lets you just push the changed layers. This can have an impact if your project is large or your internet is slow.
You can also just rsync the release output and run it directly.
I host all my services on Linode and they have always been great.
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Tks @soup , but I need pure VPS for production not using Docker,
Btw does docker can deploy to production? May I miss something?
Yes. I suggest you investigate containerised deployment. Docker is probably the simplest and most popular runtime for doing this. Podman is another option. I think you can avoid getting side tracked by other systems such as Kubernetes for now.
Docker will have the widest amount of documentation & tutorials.
I would suggest you get docker compose running locally, then get it running on your VPS (ignore your Phoenix app for now) then look into how you can deploy your app into that infrastructure. Then you are probably in a better place to make a decision on your production strategy.
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I think that is the one you have already in the official docs.
https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/releases.html
That is the one I followed to deploy on Digital Ocean VPS.
If you don’t want to use docker like me, just build the release with the same OS version as the one you have on your production machine.
You can also install elixir on your production machine and build the release from it.
Just follow the guide and if you feel lost somewhere, just ask it here. As I can see there are already very good advices here in this thread.
Good luck. ^^
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I use Linode+Dokku for a Phoenix app and it works well. Gigalixir also worked for me, and fly.io looks very promising. Gigalixir, Fly, and Dokku, though, as PaaS’s, not VMs. So they take care of a lot of the work. I didn’t need to consult the Phoenix docs.
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I’ll second (or third) the advice to follow the official documentation. That documentation is great, but there’s some context that’s not immediately obvious. First, the preferred method of deploying to a VPS would be to use Releases, as documented (and previously mentioned) here: Deploying with Releases — Phoenix v1.6.12
A release must be built on the same platform that it will be run on. That means, if your VPS is running Ubuntu, you need to build the release on Ubuntu. If you develop on a mac, you’re in a position where you have to use docker, CI or some other custom environment to build the release. That’s one reason why there’s the --dockerfile option on mix phx.gen.release. See more info here: mix release — Mix v1.14.0
If you don’t want to run Docker in production, you should be able to just copy the release up to your server, and start it with _build/prod/rel/my_app/bin/server (changing the path based on what your release path actually looks like).
Other considerations:
- If you need a database, that’s a whole separate thing. You’ll need to either set one up on that instance, or connect to one running on some other instance
- Make sure your DNS is pointed to the IP address of your VPS to test things out, and that your phoenix app is listening at least on port 80
- Make sure you have an SSL cert if you are making this publicly accessible (GitHub - sasa1977/site_encrypt: Integrated certification via Let's encrypt for Elixir-powered sites is a good way to do that)
- Consider using something like systemd to ensure that your app keeps running through restarts and gets restarted automatically if there are problems on the server
- For your own sanity, don’t neglect to set up some basic security configuration on the server (close ports you don’t need with a firewall, set up automatic updates, don’t allow ssh connections with passwords)
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Tks @dmcbrayer , I am using Ubuntu 20 LTS Server in Contabo VPS service, where the spesific folder my Ubuntu server to put my phoenix app release?
I would also recommend that you look in to docker and docker-compose think of your docker enviroment as a virtualized VPS what you do in your docker file it would be needed on your vps as well. Dockerfile read like a docuement for your release steps IMO. Here is a write up I did sometime ago which might be of some help
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It doesn’t particularly matter where you put the release package to my knowledge. I typically have a single user that let’s call bob. I’d make an app directory in bob’s home directory and drop the release package there. So to start the app I’d do something like (logged in as bob): ~/app/_build/prod/rel/my_app/bin/server to start the app.
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I use OVH to deploy my app, not the VPS, but I guess it should be the same… My instances all have Ubuntu 22.04 installed, what I did to generate my releases was create a special docker container that has the same environment as my VMs, here is the Dockerfile:
FROM ubuntu:22.04 AS build
ARG USER=builder
ARG UID=1000
ARG GID=1000
ARG PWD=builder
RUN apt-get update
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates gnupg software-properties-common wget
RUN wget -O - https://apt.kitware.com/keys/kitware-archive-latest.asc 2> /dev/null | gpg --dearmor - | tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/kitware.gpg > /dev/null
RUN apt-add-repository 'deb https://apt.kitware.com/ubuntu/ focal main'
RUN wget -O - https://apt.llvm.org/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key | apt-key add -
RUN apt-add-repository 'deb http://apt.llvm.org/jammy/ llvm-toolchain-jammy-14 main'
RUN apt-get update
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get -y dist-upgrade
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y apt-utils
RUN apt-get update
RUN wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/o/openssl/libssl1.1_1.1.1f-1ubuntu2_amd64.deb
RUN dpkg -i libssl1.1_1.1.1f-1ubuntu2_amd64.deb
RUN rm libssl1.1_1.1.1f-1ubuntu2_amd64.deb
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y clang-14 capnproto
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y git
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y curl
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y build-essential
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y libssl-dev automake autoconf libncurses5-dev
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y xsltproc fop libxml2-utils
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y libsystemd-dev
RUN update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/cc cc /usr/bin/clang-14 10
RUN update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/c++ c++ /usr/bin/clang++-14 10
RUN useradd -m $USER --uid $UID
RUN echo "${USER}:${PWD}" | chpasswd
USER ${UID}:${GID}
ENV LANG=C.UTF-8
ENV TERM=xterm-256color
RUN git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.10.2
RUN echo 'source $HOME/.asdf/asdf.sh' >> ~/.bashrc
ENV PATH="/home/${USER}/.asdf/bin:${PATH}"
ENV PATH="/home/${USER}/.asdf/shims:${PATH}"
ENV KERL_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS="--enable-systemd"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf plugin add cmake https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-cmake.git"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf install cmake 3.23.3"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf global cmake 3.23.3"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf plugin add rust"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf install rust 1.63.0"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf global rust 1.63.0"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf plugin add erlang"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf install erlang 25.0.4"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf global erlang 25.0.4"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf plugin add elixir"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf install elixir 1.14.0-otp-25"
RUN /bin/bash -c "asdf global elixir 1.14.0-otp-25"
RUN echo 'PS1="(builder) $PS1"' >> ~/.bashrc
RUN /bin/bash -c "HEX_MIRROR=https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/hex mix local.hex --force"
RUN /bin/bash -c "HEX_MIRROR=https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/hex mix local.rebar --force"
WORKDIR /home/${USER}/project
CMD ["/bin/bash"]
This will install a lot of dependencies that I need (like rust, libssl1, etc) so you can probably remove some that you don’t need and make the script simpler.
To build it I use the following command:
docker build --build-arg USER=$USER \
--build-arg UID=$(id -u) \
--build-arg GID=$(id -g) \
--no-cache \
-t my-project/builder:v1 .
And now, to use it, I first go to my elixir project directory and run:
docker run --detach-keys='ctrl-e,e' --cpus 8 --net=host -it -v$(pwd):/home/$USER/project --rm my-project/builder:v1
This will start the container, leave you in a bash inside it where you can build your release with MIX_ENV=prod mix release and then copy the resulting release in _build/prod/rel/my-project to your VPS and then run it there.
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