Setup to develop using elixir

What operating system is your host driven by? If it’s not Linux, you’ll end up installing a VM which runs the docker anyway…

I use docker extensively for my development environment, although it does not come without it’s own set of challenges.

Current setup: Linux (Ubuntu), Docker installed locally, running containers built from either images pulled from docker or custom-made and volumes (for data persistence)
Do I use it for dev: yes
Do I install things locally: with the exception of docker, no.
I can’t recommend a provider as I have not used one for dev, but I use vscode which supports docker and ssl

I do my elixir work directly on macOS, but I also work on a larger JVM-based project and we decided to do development on Google Cloud Platform.

We spin up a preemptible instance whenever we want to do work and use Mutagen to sync local files to the remote machine and to forward ports. We then edit files locally and use local web browsers to hit the local ports which get forwarded to the remote machine. An ansible script for setup and few simple bash scripts for starting and stopping everything keeps it all pretty simple.

A 4 CPU machine with 15GB RAM is USD$0.04 per hour (pro-rated to the minute and only accruing charges when the machine is running) which is pretty cheap especially if you’re not going to be using it 24x7. Google might choose to shut your machine down if they need it back (that’s the preemptible part, and the reason why it’s only 20% the price of a regular server) but because all of our work is written to our local disk before being synced up to the remote machine, there’s no risk of data loss.

I only have an available Windows machine, but I would prefer to stay away from installing anything on it. The other tool I can use is an iPad, a really old one.

I am aware that Docker is a VM, but it is at least an order of magnitude faster than VirtualBox or VMWare iirc.

Do you use VSCode online? Do you use any online IDEs?

Docker is not a VM!

But it runs in a linux VM if your host system is windows.

If you use docker4windows then the MS hypervisor is used, it will allocate the necessary memory for the VM on creation, and even if enough is available in the system, chance is that creation of the machine will fail. I had a lot of trouble using it. It never properly worked for me.

Docker Toolbox though uses VirtualBox and memory for the VM is allocated in a more host friendly way, and in general my experience using it was much better than with docker4windows.

So, your best bet is probably USB-boot into a Linux2Go.

This also solves your “I don’t want to install anything” problem.

This will work fine in a laptop, but I don’t see how it can work with an iPad.
Still, do you have any Linux images in mind you would recommend?

Who wants to work on such a thing anyway? Laptop is hard enough… Without my second monitor I’m only half as productive as usualy…

Take whatever linux you are confident with.

My old machines are really heavy and bulky. My idea is to dedicate time to this project at night before going to sleep, like reading a book. I would probably invest in a decent keyboard and stream the monitor to a TV or something. But yes, I don’t plan on programming with an iPad, only to use it as a machine I can connect to do work.

I knew a guy who developed on a remote machine on an iPad. Don’t know his setup, but probably something like this Using the iPad Pro as my development machine

I don’t use an online IDE, but I do run vscode directly in the container, so perhaps with built-in support for ssh (sorry, not ssl d’uh) it might be possible.

I played with https://codenvy.io/ a while back which was promising, but I got no further than a few simple tests - I was however able to build a complete elixir/phoenix environment quite easily.