I love the fact people go great length to optimize code to shave of a millisecond but never tweak Postgres or check the latency of an external Postgres (cloud) instance. Let alone check their indexes once a year 
BartOtten
5
kreiling.io
I have recently taken a liking to Coolify - I self-host it on Hetzner and deploy toy projects to it. The Dockerfile generated by Phoenix just works if I remember correctly. It’s also wicked easy to deploy Postgres and a slew of other OSS dependencies. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re comfortable managing a VPS and are aiming for a good balance of cost & developer experience
3
derek-zhou
If those small projects are all written by you, and you can ensure there is not library version conflict, you can run them all in the same Erlang release. There is main proxy, but something as simple as this will work, with liveview and all that.
defmodule MySuperProject.Plug do
def init(options) do
options
end
def call(%Plug.Conn{host: "app1.host.domain"} = conn, opts) do
App1Web.Endpoint.call(conn, opts)
end
def call(%Plug.Conn{host: "app2.host.domain"} = conn, opts) do
App2Web.Endpoint.call(conn, opts)
end
def call(conn, opts) do
DefaultAppWeb.Endpoint.call(conn, opts)
end
end
15
LostKobrakai
Yeah, because websockets since phoenix 1.7 are also plug based. It doesn’t work with earlier versions of phoenix.
3
derek-zhou
Yes. I forgot to mention that I use Phoenix 1.7+ and Bandit, N small projects, one release, one tcp port, one live dashboard.
3
raulrpearson
[how to cheaply host many small projects with likely low traffic]
I’m also trying to figure out this exact same thing. Hetzner VPS (or similar) with some ergonomic way to cram multiple projects into a single server seems the way to go.
A couple of options that you likely know about already are Kamal and Dokku. I got excited about Kamal, but I don’t like that it currently requires a container registry. Dokku seems promising and I was trying to set it up but run into skill issues. I like the idea of just being able to use Dokku as a git remote, push code and have it automatically run all the build and deployment actions.
Could be cool to have one of these OSS PaaS written in Elixir, maybe designed specifically to fit the needs of Elixir apps. I looked into main_proxy but I’m put off by the constraint of having all projects avoid dependency conflicts. It seems like it will add maintenance burden that I’d rather not have to deal with.
I’m also thinking that I might try to skip the whole Docker part and just SCP mix releases into a machine with a Postgres and proxy (nginx, Caddy, Traefik) running. Maybe not that crazy if you just gradually build up a couple of shell scripts to automate things a bit?
2
linusdm
Just out of curiosity, for those setting up their own Postgres instance: how do you manage backups? You set it up at all. Since the stakes are low, I totally get it if this would be skipped 
3
D4no0
I think the easiest solution is to just enable snapshot backups on your VPS, not sure how reliable it is for cheap providers like hetzner, however on AWS I’ve used it successfully a few times, the main benefit being that you can restore the snapshot almost instantly.
Otherwise I think there should be 100 more ways to do that, starting from a cron script that uses posgres CLI to write a backup to a file and copy it somewhere, to more fancy tools like pgAgent
You can also use postgres replication, this is more involved as there are database design considerations when using it, however it allows to have redundant topologies in case of catastrophic failures.
4
lud
I’m using docker compose and traefik. The CI pipeline for a given project logs in with ssh, git pulls, and restart the container for the project
Quick and dirty since it’s just demos.
1
Mostalive
I have been running Dokku on a hetzner VPS for a couple of years for several architectural spikes, one phoenix. Once it was set up I found it easy to maintain (but I adopted containers before docker, YMMV). Set up involved a bit of trial and Error.
What I like about Dokku is that it makes it very easy to gradually develop and launch. Eg start new site, add letsencrypt for it, start developing without login, just add dokku basic auth, see if the idea works and then later add logins, access control etc. And I get effortless remote private git repositories for every experiment.
Possible downside is that you need a bigger vps than for just hosting, since dokku also builds before running (mine was already oversized because of a haskell deployment, I don’t know if this is an issue with elixir). It can also pull images, but I quite like the tight push-build-deploy flow.
I was not aware of coolify. Might look into it to see how it compares.
(And nice to see @artem around, I believe we met eons ago at a conference in Helsinki).
5