Update: Xamal is now Mix-first (no more stand-alone CLI)

Big one. @dannote (Danila Poyarkov) put together a substantial PR that reworked Xamal from a standalone escript CLI into idiomatic Mix tasks. mix xamal.* is now the command surface, config moved from YAML/EEx to native Elixir config, and there’s an explicit Xamal.Context{} passed through instead of process-global state. It fits a normal Elixir project much more naturally now.

Huge thanks Danila - I like this approach much better!

Since then (all in the last few hours) I’ve cleaned things up on top: 0.3.1 is on Hex with CI/release sorted, plus a handful of fixes ~ expansion in SSH key paths, interactive SSH sessions, and CLI flag parsing.

Hex: xamal | Hex
Repo: GitHub - dmkenney/xamal: Deploy Elixir apps to bare metal servers. Like Kamal, but with native releases + Caddy instead of Docker. · GitHub
PR: Make Xamal Mix-first and Elixir-config driven by dannote · Pull Request #4 · dmkenney/xamal · GitHub

It was two-fold.

1. First it just seemed like an extra unnecessary layer - which it is, but admittedly does have some nice benefits probably why it was on my todo list for so long.
2. One of my applications needs ffmpeg which roughly tripled the Docker image size. Not the end of the world, but it just bothered me a bit. I did try to install ffmpeg on the underlying OS and shell out from the application running inside Docker to it (so it wasn’t included in the image), but couldn’t get it to work.

So mostly just an itch I had for a while to simplify things since we really don’t need Docker with Elixir.

Thanks for sharing!

Just like they made a custom proxy that understands their needs (Rails), I can see a world where a custom proxy (or an off the shelve proxy configured appropriately) that understands the BEAM, Phoenix and LiveView could be beneficial.