New Phoenix Developer: Installation Directory, UFW Firewall Rules, Run Nonstop

So it sounds like you have a VPS. I would suggest using mix release to package everything.

This will allow you to:

• start in foreground with logs to stdout
• package your assets
• runtime configuration through environmental variables
• bundling of erts,etc.
• connect a remote shell

So just pick a directory and a user, just make sure it isn’t root. The release package will take care of the rest.

Docs:

Generally speaking, most people use a reverse proxy to forward the traffic to phoenix on port 4000. The only ports available to the public should be 80 and 443. Search for nginx reverse proxy or haproxy reverse proxy guides. An alternative is to expose phoenix directly on port 443 itself and use a library like SiteEncrypt — site_encrypt v0.7.0 to manage the ssl certificate from LetsEncrypt.

You can just run the release via a supervisor in the foreground. I’m pretty old-school and have the logs piped out to stdout via runit / daemontools, but you can use systemd as well.

Hope that helps.

Welcome to the forum!

For this portion I would recommend GitHub - hauleth/erlang-systemd: systemd utilities for Erlang applications · GitHub

Thanks for the response. Basically, I’m set up on Dreamhost’s Cloud Compute service. It’s not actually a VPS, but I have my server configured that way to separate each of my websites/users, as I have about 20 websites hosted on one server, so that if one gets hacked, I can contain the damage to just one user.

I did some research on reverse proxy (been a few years since I worked with Node), but I remembered that I have a setup like below on Apache. This was thrown together and eventually worked for my Node.js chat app:

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName www.example.com
  ServerAlias example.com
  DocumentRoot /home/example/example.com

  #// socket.io 1.0+ starts all connections with an HTTP polling request
  RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} transport=polling       [NC]
  RewriteRule /(.*)           http://127.0.0.1:3000/$1 [P]

  #// When socket.io wants to initiate a WebSocket connection, it sends an
  #// "upgrade: websocket" request that should be transferred to ws://
  RewriteCond %{HTTP:Upgrade} websocket               [NC]
  RewriteRule /(.*)           ws://127.0.0.1:3000/$1  [P]

  ProxyRequests Off  # can't remember why this is set to "Off"
  ProxyPass /chatnode http://127.0.0.1:3000
  ProxyPassReverse /chatnode http://127.0.0.1:3000

</VirtualHost>

I remember this part being a real pain working with Node and I didn’t understand it too well, so I’m hoping it will be easier with Phoenix.

How would you set up this block of code to run Node and Phoenix at the same time? I’d like to have our Node-based chat continue to run for our users while I experiment and develop the new Phoenix app at the same time.

UPDATE:

I’ve been working for a few hours now, I added the following to my apache VirtualHost tag:

  ProxyRequests Off
  ProxyPass /ex http://127.0.0.1:4000
  ProxyPassReverse /ex http://127.0.0.1:4000

However, I’m having problems getting the default “Welcome to Phoenix!” page on example.com/ex/

I edited /config/config.exs with:

config :chatter, ChatterWeb.Endpoint,
  url: [host: "localhost", path: "/ex"],

I edited: /lib/endpoint.ex with:

plug Plug.Static,
    at: "/ex",
    from: :chatter,

The welcome page shows up on example.com/ex, but none of the css, images or any other files load up. If I click a link in the source code, for example: <link rel="stylesheet" href="/ex/css/app.css"/>, I’ll get an error like:

Phoenix.Router.NoRouteError at GET /css/app.css
no route found for GET /css/app.css (ChatterWeb.Router)
Available routes
          page_path  GET  /                       ChatterWeb.PageController :index
live_dashboard_path  GET  /dashboard              Phoenix.LiveView.Plug :home
live_dashboard_path  GET  /dashboard/:page        Phoenix.LiveView.Plug :page
live_dashboard_path  GET  /dashboard/:node/:page  Phoenix.LiveView.Plug :page

I tried changing /lib/chatter_web/router.ex with various combinations, like:

 scope "/ex", ChatterWeb do
    pipe_through :browser

    get "/", PageController, :index
  end

or:

  scope "/", ChatterWeb do
    pipe_through :browser

    get "/ex", PageController, :index
  end

but I’m kinda stuck now.

I’m still having problems here trying to get my website URL https://www.example.com/ex/ to display the default “Welcome To Phoenix” page. I made some slight changes and made some progress. First, I created a new project in my web user directory where I plan to use it indefinitely. In apache, I’ve edited the virtual host to:

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName www.example.com
  ServerAlias example.com
  DocumentRoot /home/example/example.com

  <Location /ex/>
    ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:4000/ex/
    ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:4000/ex/
  </Location>
</VirtualHost>

and left the router.ex the same:

 scope "/ex", ChatterWeb do
    pipe_through :browser

    get "/", PageController, :index
  end

So when I go to that URL (without the port 4000 part), the css, js and image files loaded up. However, in the logs, I still get this error:

[info] GET /ex/phoenix/live_reload/frame
[debug] ** (Phoenix.Router.NoRouteError) no route found for GET /ex/phoenix/live_reload/frame (ExchatWeb.Router)
    (exchat 0.1.0) lib/phoenix/router.ex:402: ExchatWeb.Router.call/2
    (exchat 0.1.0) lib/exchat_web/endpoint.ex:1: ExchatWeb.Endpoint.plug_builder_call/2
    (exchat 0.1.0) lib/plug/debugger.ex:136: ExchatWeb.Endpoint."call (overridable 3)"/2
    (exchat 0.1.0) lib/exchat_web/endpoint.ex:1: ExchatWeb.Endpoint.call/2
    (phoenix 1.5.10) lib/phoenix/endpoint/cowboy2_handler.ex:65: Phoenix.Endpoint.Cowboy2Handler.init/4
    (cowboy 2.9.0) /home/example/exchat/deps/cowboy/src/cowboy_handler.erl:37: :cowboy_handler.execute/2
    (cowboy 2.9.0) /home/example/exchat/deps/cowboy/src/cowboy_stream_h.erl:306: :cowboy_stream_h.execute/3
    (cowboy 2.9.0) /home/example/exchat/deps/cowboy/src/cowboy_stream_h.erl:295: :cowboy_stream_h.request_process/3
    (stdlib 3.15.1) proc_lib.erl:226: :proc_lib.init_p_do_apply/3

When I click on the “Live Dashboard” link (https://example.com/ex/dashboard), I get the same type of error:

##### Phoenix.Router.NoRouteError <small>at GET</small> <small>/ex/dashboard</small>

# no route found for GET /ex/dashboard (ExchatWeb.Router)

Just trying to get the default phoenix page working on a production website URL so I can begin practicing… Right now, I’m just randomly adding/subtracting “/ex” to various snippets in the endpoints/router files, probably breaking stuff in the process, and there is no good guide on the internet on just doing this basic thing of getting example.com:4000 to fully work on example.com/[some-directory]/