Is there a Phoenix VPS Deployment Guide?

Hey @Nvim! What are you looking for that isn’t in the official guide? Introduction to Deployment — Phoenix v1.8.8

I’d note that you probably don’t need Nginx as the Cowboy webserver used by Phoenix is plenty fast enough for serving static assets etc.

@Ipil Thanks I’ll check this out just not familiar how Cowboy performs.

If you have any problems post here. Good luck!

also:

and

Ok I’m taking this opportunity. ^^
I have an umbrella project that contains 2 web apps (frontend and admin).
In the official deployment guide there is no specific path for an umbrella project.
So in my case do I have to deploy the 2 phoenix web apps separetely or as a whole one project.
I just want to be sure if I will be doing the things the right way.
In my understanding it is better to deploy them separetely. Is it ok?

Also in my case, since the 2 web apps will be running on the same VPS, I think I will need something like HAProxy (unless I want to keep some :PORT in the admin app urls for example).
Am I right? If I am, do you think NGINX is a better choice than HAProxy for that?

Hey!

I’m a big fan of keeping everything as simple as possible so instead of effectively serving two applications on two ports I would mount one application on the other, possibly by using Phoenix’s forward macro to redirect requests to the /admin path to the admin app’s router module Phoenix.Router — Phoenix v1.8.8.
This way you’re only deploying one web application and the admin app gets requests under /admin for example.

If you want to go with running your app in Docker, then a better choice is Traefik

The Cloud Native Edge Router

A reverse proxy / load balancer that’s easy, dynamic, automatic, fast, full-featured, open source, production proven, provides metrics, and integrates with every major cluster technology… No wonder it’s so popular!

The best of all in this Traefik setup is that the generation and renewal of LetsEncrypt certificates is done on the fly.

An example docker compose file:

version: "2.1"

services:

  phoenix:
    image: phoenix/app
    build: ./docker
    restart: always
    env_file: .env
    environment:
      - MIX_ENV=prod
    networks:
      - traefik
      - default
    command: "elixir -S mix phx.server"
    volumes:
      - "$PWD:/home/elixir/workspace"
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.backend=elixir-app-name"
      - "traefik.docker.network=traefik"
      - "traefik.port=4000"
      - "traefik.frontend.rule=Host:example.com"

networks:
  traefik:
external: true

NOTE: This file is not tested and is an adaptation of a current one for a Python server

To setup Traefik on the Host just follow the docs about LetsEncrypt & Docker.

I would not under any circumstances describe traefik as a “better” tool than nginx or haproxy - particularly for a single host. It trades away at least a decade worth of hardening and optimizing for a mildly easier configuration format, and even that is subjective. Nor should anyone advocate using docker-compose for serious deployments.

Both nginx/haproxy would serve well at splitting one port number to two applications by some combination of host name and/or path, and will otherwise stay out of your way very well. It’s still trivial to automate LetsEncrypt with either one. I would ultimately still aim for @lpil’s suggestion of keeping to a single deployment if possible, though, and you’ll find Cowboy very capable in its own right.

Any benchmark of Cowboy vs Nginx?

I wrote a guide on how to do a CI build/deploy using ansible: https://dreamconception.com/tech/phoenix-automated-build-and-deploy-made-simple/

We’ve been using this setup to automate deploys to digital ocean. Here’s the sample repo: GitHub - danschultzer/ansible-phoenix-build: Sample app with full build and deploy setup of a Phoenix app using ansible · GitHub

It doesn’t cover provisioning, but we use ansible for that too (nginx, mariadb, letsencrypt, etc).