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Deploying Elixir with Docker Part 1

·4 mins

This is a multi part article about deployment of an Elixir application with Docker.

This part will be about building a distillery release for a Phoenix Application.

Part 2 will discuss packaging this release into a Docker container

Part 3 will show you how to deploy this container to a container runtime.

Part 4 will wrap it all up and show you how to integrate all if this into a Continuous Delivery Workflow

Situation #

I developed a Phoenix application that helps me with my everyday freelance time tracking. I use toggl for all my time tracking at my clients but I use Fastbill for all my invoicing.

As there is no direct integration, I had to build a project myself. Phoenix might be a little overkill for such a task but it was a good learning at the time. This tool saves my hours of work and I use it on a daily basis.

It’s pretty simple. I use Zapier to issue a webhook for every new toggl entry and the Phoenix app will call the Fastbill API to create a time slot. No state, very low maintenance. I have not released a new version of the project for over a year. You can see the version that is deployed on Heroku in the GitHub history.

To sum up the application:

As I have not touched it for a year I thought: Why not get my hands dirty and change something with the deployment.

I really like Docker and Distillery so I wanted to try out how that works with Elixir projects. Also I stumbled upon hyper.sh so why not give that a try.

Adding Distillery #

The first task is to setup distillery to compile the app into a release.

First step here: add distillery to the mix.exs file:

{:distillery, "~> 1.4"}

After that: create the necessary release configuration. You can use the bundled mix task for that:

mix release.init

After that you should see something like this:

An example config file has been placed in rel/config.exs, review it,
make edits as needed/desired, and then run `mix release` to build the release

The default options are good enough for us now.

Configuration #

In theory a simple MIX_ENV=prod mix release --env=prod will build the release and we can proceed deploying it, but in practice this will likely fail due to how the configuration works. So let’s have a look on what the problem is.

My prod.secret.exs looks like this:

config :time_tracking, TimeTracking.Endpoint,
  secret_key_base: System.get_env("SECRET_KEY_BASE")

config :time_tracking,
  fastbill_email: System.get_env("FASTBILL_EMAIL"),
  fastbill_token: System.get_env("FASTBILL_TOKEN"),
  fastbill_timezone: System.get_env("FASTBILL_TIMEZONE")

This is a fairly common pattern in Elixir projects. Make sure the environment variables will be set on the production system, and then just start the application.

As Distillery will convert all your config/* files into an Erlang sys.config file, all your dynamic fragments will be evaluated at build time.

So unless you have all your environment variables ready at build time your app will not behave correctly. Read more about configuration in the distillery documentation

So you’ll need to find another way. There are several options but the one that worked best for me was the REPLACE_OS_VARS feature provided by Distillery. This is how it works: You replace all your values in the config file with ${ENV_NAME}. They will be replaced upon startup of the app.

After this adjustment my prod.secret.exs looks like this:

config :time_tracking, TimeTracking.Endpoint,
  secret_key_base: "${SECRET_KEY_BASE}"

config :time_tracking,
  fastbill_email: "${FASTBILL_EMAIL}",
  fastbill_token: "${FASTBILL_TOKEN}",
  fastbill_timezone: "${FASTBILL_TIMEZONE}"

In addition I used this syntax for the production cookie (which is needed when you want to connect to a running Erlang VM) in rel/config.exs.

environment :prod do
  set include_erts: true
  set include_src: false
  set cookie: :"${PRODUCTION_COOKIE}"
end

Furthermore it never hurts to configure the port from the outside:

Also make sure you set server to true so that phoenix will start with the release.

config :time_tracking, TimeTrackingWeb.Endpoint,
  http: [port: "${PORT}"],
  url: [host: "localhost", port: "${PORT}"],
  server: true

As I don’t have any assets to compile, we are done here but additional information can be found in the Distillery Documentation

That was the first part of deploying an Elixir application. The next part will talk about integrating the built release with Docker.

Continue with part 2 of this post

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