Deploying Elixir Book | Hacker News Reader

Deploying Elixir Book

store.miguelcoba.com

26 pointsmiguelcoba13 comments

This is my Deploying Elixir ebook.

It is free, just put a zero on the price field.

Enjoy.

Thanks for writing and posting it. It looks useful. Like it says on the cover, it is about how to deploy Elixir to various cloud hosts such as Digital Ocean. There is not much about actual Elixir programming, but that is fine, it doesn't claim to have that.

I like that it is under a CC license. It's slightly unfortunate that the pdf is 27MB. Do you think of releasing whatever "source code" you generated it from? Can I ask what you used? (Maybe it says inside someplace, but I haven't examined the book closely yet). It would be nice if it were in a git repo or wiki somewhere, so that people could send updates as the Elixir and hosting ecosystems change.

I haven't yet used Elixir and one of my not-so-happy memories of using Erlang was that while the language and base libs were themselves well documented, in order to get anything done you had to know the whereabouts of a lot of community resources such as git repos, plus figure out various bits of deployment magic. This book will at least help with the latter.

Hey there, thanks for checking it.

Effectively, the book is not about the language but about deploying to different service providers like DigitalOcean, Fly.io, render.com or heroku.

The source code is mentioned in the book and available here: https://github.com/miguelcoba/saturn

Hope you find this book useful.

So you need to read a whole book to deploy Elixir, people say Elixir is easy and straightforward but I think they are downplaying the amount of overhead BEAM/OTP/deploying brings to the table.

These days deploying elixir to pretty much any platform is insanely easy. Heroku, Fly.io, etc all have good guides for phoenix apps if that's your preference. Likewise Elixir's build tool Mix (Rake or NPM for Elixir) will generate a Dockerfile for your phoenix web application if you prefer containerisation. If you want to deploy straight onto a VM then `mix release` will setup the files needed to make an erlang/beam "release" with BEAM bundled in so you can run it without any special dependencies.

Looking at the contents of the book it looks like it goes into depth on how "releases" work, and gives guides to using a bunch of popular platforms like heroku, digital ocean, etc. It's looks like a conveniant collection of recipes for different hosting options.

Hi, that's correct. It is my attempt to contribute back to the elixir community in the form of easy guides to deploy. I have learned a lot from the Elixir people and I am fortunate to pay my bills by working with elixir on the day job so this is a way to get more developers to use Elixir. Thanks for checking the book. Hope you find it useful.

> So you need to read a whole book to deploy Elixir

This isn't even remotely true. When I learned Elixir in 2016, I was able to deploy using the exact same setup as I'd used previously for Node and then Rails. This was a Phoenix app, run using mix.

Then the next day, I learned how to compile and run an Erlang release. This made deployment simpler than anything else I'd worked with previously, though not quite as easy as I've since experienced that compile down to a native binary with no external requirements at all.

Now, Phoenix even has a flag to build a docker container with a single mix command. It's not quite as easy to deploy as Go or Rust, but it's truly hard to imagine an interpreted language getting much easier.

Yes, we are lucky that currently it is super easy to deploy, to the point, as you said, that the official build tool has a flag to generate the dockerfile. At the end, we developers benefit from more people using Elixir/Phoenix and this is my attempt to increase the number of people using it in prod.

I'm appreciative of your work!

I disagree with the claim that the book's existence is evidence of a deficiency in the ecosystem. That's nothing against the book itself! On the contrary, creating more resources like this is a win for everyone.

Thanks!

^ please don't feed the trolls https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1479160925349462019/pho...

Hi, I wont say you need to read a whole book, but some amount of reading is required to deploy any stack. Nobody was born knowing everything and my book is intended for people like me that are just learning how to do deployments with elixir. It is helpful for us to have a guide and a comparison between the different alternatives that exists right now. Hope the book helps facilitate new developers all over the world to use elixir in production. Have a nice day

I would assume there are also more than 70 pages of docs across these 6 cloud/SaaS options for any language that wouldn't be easier to attack as hopelessly obscure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com