IMHO an Elixir project is hand down the easiest to deploy than anything else, with the exception of a fat binary Go project. Everything is contained in a release already. Now, I skip all the tooling and just rsync a release, then restart the daemon. Do you really need Kamal?
derek-zhou
D4no0
derek-zhou
roll back the code, build again, and deploy again? Or I can keep several date coded releases around; I can make it work with just a few lines of shell scripts.
I have seen fancy tools that automate all these and much more. However, as a solo-developer, I value simplicity above everything else. Everything will eventually break, at the most inconvenient time. When that happens, do I want to fix my 10 line script, or do I want to stare at 5 layers of abstractions, have no clue, and search the web in panic?
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D4no0
Sound like a very interesting option, do you build the release on your machine exclusively or it doesn’t matter?
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derek-zhou
I have a basement PC for the build. I could build on a VPS but that would be slow. The basement PC also run tests, hold backups for the database, among other things.
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posilva
There is no reason to not deploy with Kamal2 I do not see the point of having anything specific to elixir. Elixir release bundles can be deployed as a compressed file over ssh if you want nothing except a VPS you can even bundle Erlang if you want so all in one. Other then that just ship a docker container, kamal2, fly.io, Kubernetes, ECS task and IIRC there is even a AWS lambda runtime. We need less tools and more unified ways of working so we can use as much as possible the same tools no matter what is the programming language.
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posilva
posilva
Dmk
Creating a Kamal style deployment tool without Docker for Elixir applications has been on my todo list for a while. Finally got around to it this weekend.
You can find it here - GitHub - dmkenney/xamal: Deploy Elixir apps to bare metal servers. Like Kamal, but with native releases + Caddy instead of Docker. · GitHub.
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vkryukov
Interesting timing @Dmk - I also just finished extracting my set of mix scripts to simplify working with an existing kamal setup into its own package, available here: GitHub - vkryukov/kamal_ops: Elixir mix tasks for operating a kamal deployment. · GitHub
Now I can e.g. mix kamal.remote --env prod, and get an IEx shell on the remote machine, with auto-complete and all.
It should also be fairly easy to add kamal to an existing Elixir project: just have kamal installed, and get an IP address of a machine you can ssh as a root to; and run
mix igniter.install kamal_ops --init --host 1.2.3.4
It should right a proper .kamal/deploy.yaml and instruct you what to do next.
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