Elixir Phoenix deployment with Mina

Update April 6 2018 –– edeliver is great, but for a new application I would also suggest looking at Nanobox –- I have not personally used Nanobox for Elixir yet, but for Rails applicatioins it is brilliant and I imagine the Elixir support is equally solid.

Update: This is a world of hurt. I have subsequently discovered [edeliver](https://github.com/boldpoker/edeliver) and it looks solid. I will update this with better notes on server setup and edeliver deploys.

This is how I am deploying a Phoenix application to a Linode using Mina.

Note that my Phoenix application is an API only and so I did not need to look into compiling and deploying assets with Brunch. This may need to be addressed in the Mina recipe for an application that does require static assets.

I followed the Phoenix exrm deployment guides and also referred to some other blog articles and projects for reference:

https://github.com/ohr486/elixirdeployexample/blob/master/README.md
http://learnelixir.com/blog/2014/10/16/deploy-phoenix-application-to-a-ubuntu-server/
https://github.com/maruware/capistrano-phoenix

I configured upstart as per the Phoenix guides, and added Erlang and Elixir via Chef recipes:

cookbook 'erlang', github: 'opscode-cookbooks/erlang'
cookbook 'elixir', github: 'parroty/chef-cookbook-elixir'

I added a Gemfile:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'mina'

And then installed Mina:

bundle

This is my Mina deploy.rb file:

require 'mina/git'
require 'mina/rbenv'

set :domain, 'www.example.com'
set :deploy_to, '/path/to/my/app'

set :repository, 'ssh://git@example.com/me/my-app.git'
set :branch, 'master'
set :app_name, 'my-app'

set :shared_paths, ['log', 'config/prod.secret.exs']

set :user, 'me'
set :forward_agent, true
set :identity_file, '/path/to/my/key'

set :log_path, "#{deploy_to}/#{current_path}/rel/#{app_name}/log"

task :setup do
  queue %[sudo mkdir -p "#{log_path}"]
  queue %[sudo chmod g+rx,u+rwx "#{log_path}"]
end

desc "Deploys the current version to the server."
task :deploy do
  deploy do
    invoke :'git:clone'
    invoke :'deploy:link_shared_paths'
    queue %[mix deps.get]
    queue %[MIX_ENV=prod mix release]
    
    to :launch do
      invoke :'elixir:stop'
      invoke :'elixir:start'
    end

    to :clean do
      queue 'echo "Failed deployment"'
    end

  end
end

namespace :elixir do

  desc "start"
  task :start do
    queue "echo 'Elixir #{cmd}'"
    queue "sudo start #{app_name}"
  end

  desc "stop"
  task :stop do
    queue "echo 'Elixir stop'"
    queue "sudo stop #{app_name}"
  end

  desc "ping"
  task :ping do
    queue "echo 'Elixir ping'"
    queue "cd #{deploy_to}/#{current_path}/rel/#{app_name}/bin && ./#{app_name} ping"
  end

end

task :logs do
  queue 'echo "Contents of the log file are as follows:"'
  queue "tail -f `/bin/ls -1td #{log_path}/*| /usr/bin/head -n1`"
end

To deploy:

mina deploy

And to view logs:

mina logs

I am available for Elixir/Phoenix consulting work – get in touch to learn more.

Aug 30, 2015

Elixir Phoenix deployment with Mina