Suggestions for Phoenix deployment in AWS

Questions / Help
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Hi folks, i am planning on deploying my app in aws. I have deployed Rails app in EC2. But its my first time for elixir, phoenix. So please guide me here, without docker.
App is a simple, now. it may grow bigger after a month or 2. and there will be a chat functionality (one to one). I have already deployed my app in heroku and gigalixir using distillery. wanted to do the same in aws
Please guide me here

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Found edeliver, reading http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2016/06/deploying-elixir-applications-with-edeliver/
will update soon how it goes. please do post your suggestions

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That article is pretty out of date at this point. Elixir 1.9+ has releases built into mix. There’s other threads here on the topic, but you could start with the Phoenix docs on releases at https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/releases.html as a good reference point.

And welcome to Phoenix! It’s a fun framework.

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thanks @elcritch, i appreciate it. i do knew little bit about releases, when i read about heroku/gigalixir deployment docs and i went with distillery.

Googling few blogs for aws deployemnt, found out this one,

please do post, blogs on phoenix deployment to AWS.

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This got me curious! What aspect of your design discard Docker from the equation?

I’ve deployed many Elixir web applications to cloud providers with (then) Distillery and (now) mix release and it is, imho so much simpler for 95% of the use cases…

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I only deploy with Elixir releases nowadays. I have to say you shouldn’t shy away from Docker, necessarily!

If you’re trying to deploy to a VPS (such as EC2), I actually do the following:

  • Setup infrastructure such as databases and Nginx on the host
  • Write a script for building the release in a Docker image with the same OS as the host you’re deploying to. The release can produce a tarball, which you copy out of the Docker image and rsync it to the server.
  • The rest is easy - untar it on the server, stop the old application, and fire up the new release!

For secrets, I have a prod.env file on the host that is loaded using bash’s source command, and those env vars are loaded by rel/releases.exs on-boot.

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Hi folks, sorry for the late update. I went with releases. I haven’t spent much time exploring docker, well its in the pipeline, and next stop would be deploying with docker.
thank you folks

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@kreiling.io are you injecting secrets? are you generating prod.env on the fly in your CI/CD (or any release method) is there a different process responsibly for copying the prod.env ?

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@tenzil since you are deploying to AWS EC2 would you mind sharing the OS image being used?

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I keep a folder full of secret files on my dev laptop synchronized with all of my hosts through rsync, and that is how I distribute secrets to my hosts. This way I can share common secrets across my hosts in the same file(s)

However I’d be wary of doing this in the event that you need to collaborate and synchronize secrets across more than 5-10 developers - then you might want to look into something remote & secure, such as AWS Secrets Manager or AWS Parameter Store.

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