Background
Unless you’re developing an app just for your own personal use, you need to somehow make it accessible to other people.
This is really straightforward for web apps: Just deploy it to a server.
A couple issues:
- You need a server.
- You need a public host name.
Finding a virtual server:
- Well known commodity providers:
- Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc.
- Standard price: 2GB of RAM = $12/month
- Big Cloud Providers:
- Note: These tend to be more expensive and more complicated than the VPS providers, while trying to upsell you nonsense.
- These are not recommended for this class, unless you can get a free Oracle ARM VM working.
- Amazon (Lightsail), Azure, Oracle, Google, etc.
- Discount VPS Providers:
- ovhcloud.com (8GB of RAM = $5/month)
- https://www.racknerd.com/BlackFriday/ (2.5GB of RAM = $20/year)
- https://lowendtalk.com/ (A forum full of ads)
Finding a public host name:
- I use joker.com for domain registration.
- Other vendors exist:
- GoDaddy is unreliable.
- Probably tucows (hover.com) is good.
- Using your hosting provider or a big cloud provider as your registrar risks lock-in.
I’ve got a RackNerd server with a hostname pointed at it:
- ettin.homework.quest
Deploying Shard
There are good docs covering some core deployment issues at: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/deployment.html
Deployment checklist:
- Debian or Ubuntu VPS with sufficient RAM and swap.
- DNS hostname pointed to server.
- System user account for app.
- Build deps installed on build machine.
- Simplest: Build machine is target machine.
- That means asdf, erlang, elixir, nodejs.
- Figure out env variables:
- Port
- Secrets
- Build / deploy script.
- Systemd service file.
- Nginx config file.
Continuous Deployment
When tests pass, we’d like to auto-deploy.
How can we do that with like 10 servers?
