Umbrella Application Structure How-To / Advice

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
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1

I’m wanting to start a new Elixir/Phoenix application and wanted to confirm my understanding of how I should execute the mix tasks in order to obtain the structure I need.

Let’s say my main application name is “my_app”. Inside “my_app” I need three separate applications. Those three applications will use the Phoenix LiveView component and are called:

  • core (back end logic & functions)
  • front_end (views & view logic)
  • site_admin (views & view logic)

I would like to confirm the following steps I need to execute in order to setup the above structure:

  1. mix phx.new my_app --umbrella
  2. cd my_app/apps
  3. mix phx.new core
  4. mix phx.new front_end --live
  5. mix phx.new site_admin --live

Thank you in advance for your time and advice.

2

My main reason for posting this is to work out the correct commands to ensure that I have live pages enabled.

Is anybody able to assist me?

3

It is highly unusual to have 3 Phoenix servers in the same umbrella.

But If I had to do it, I would probably take the same procedure.

I started with umbrellas, but now I prefer to separate in smaller packages. I find it more flexible.

4

Hi @kokolegorille each server is a separate part of the application, an e-commerce application, I need to be able to start and stop them separately and keep a payments application totally separate for easier PCI compliance. Additionally I’ll be using context’s within each project. I chose umbrella as I need the ability to deploy each project separately, and not necessarily at the same time.

How should I set up my mix project to do just one server? Should I put the –live flag and the –umbrella flag on the top level mix statement only? Should I opt for such a set up or would the Architecture I started with be better?

5

This is going to create multiple Phoenix servers…

Same ecommerce, does this mean same database?

I don’t see the point of grouping all under the same umbrella, if they are meant to be separate, but I don’t understand the use case well…

6

Each umbrella app forms a part of a greater app, an e-commerce application. Yes, same database too.

If using an umbrella application and I manage to decouple the code sufficiently, I can then start and stop parts of the application separately.

Say for example I want to stop the backend whilst leaving other parts running, I am pretty sure In this case I’d only need a single server instance, would you agree?

If this is the case, how should I structure my mix statements?

7

Exactly this… but not with an umbrella. I would simply build separate servers from the start (if I had too).

8

Thank you @kokolegorille. I appreciate your advice. I’ll ponder this a while, then make an appropriate decision.