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Comment by ocean3 | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried Elixir/Phoenix framework?

I looked at it a while back. Even played around with Elixir, which I liked as a language quite a lot. But the deployment and configuration for Elixir/Phoenix/Ecto was pretty horrendous. Lots of dependencies, lots of tweaking, I think even NPM was required too?!

I do have fun bashing Go, but I also use it. It's too practical not to. And the Go team, above all other of the latest wave of language that are ready for production, got that 100% right. I just can't overstate how simple Go makes setup, deployment, and updates. And how complex Elixir is in comparison.

I wish Elixir et al. could have a zero dependency, zero external configuration, and single/xcopy file deployment too.

Using exrm its a very simple setup. You get a deployable tar file which gives you the ability to migrate up and down as well. The only issue i have is wrt to running migrations on deploy server. Go is very good for services. But i didn't find any mature libraries like Phoenix.

Exrm looks good for updating an already established application. Doesn't look like it does anything for the initial setup and configuration of a new system though.

For me, the ultimate test is can I copy my application to a flash drive, walk it to a new clean system, and "paste" it to that new system. Go really does let me do that.

> But i didn't find any mature libraries like Phoenix.

Yup. But then I tend not to need larger frameworks with my Go apps. Like you allude to, Go apps tend to be less monolithic.

> For me, the ultimate test is can I copy my application to a flash drive, walk it to a new clean system, and "paste" it to that new system. Go really does let me do that.

That used to be the case for erlang deployments that looked pretty similar, and Exrm looks like it does the same thing:

https://hexdocs.pm/exrm/extra-deployment.html

There are five stages to creating and deploying a first release. The first is just generating it, the next three are for moving the release to a new place and the third is just decompressing it.

Live upgrades/downgrades seem pretty similar: https://hexdocs.pm/exrm/extra-upgrades-and-downgrades.html

Clearly I'm not as up to speed as I might be. How do I avoid installing and configuring Erlang, Elixir, Phoenix, etc. on each machine I want to "paste" to? How do I bundle all these into one extract and go package?

The tar contains erlang runtime. It has config file as well which can edited to change the setting.

Then definitely more interesting than my cursory look. I don't see any mention of bundling the runtime but I'll take your word and dig around a bit more. Thanks for the info.

If its the same architecture then you can copy the tar file to another system and run it. Its the same for Go apps except you get a binary. I do not want to recreate all the structure( I basically do web apps). Phoenix provides good defaults. If it was few lines of code then Go is fine, for larger project i prefer Phoenix( prefer might not be the right word since i don't have elixir prod apps while i do have Go apps)

Not yet, I've got as far as reading the Elixir docs start to back, I really enjoyed what I saw, I'm yet to have a play around with it though. I'm hoping to this weekend :)

I wrote some notes on my own "weekend with Elixir"[1] - literally - maybe you'll find something helpful there.

[1] https://klibert.pl/posts/weekend_with_elixir.html

This is great! Thanks, this has inspired me!

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