Introduction

When you first start programming you’ll often hear that you should always version control your code.

You’ll also hear words thrown around such as Git, GitHub, GitLab and similar services.

If you’re not sure what the difference is I’ll be breaking it down in this post, but first a high level overview of the difference between them:

Git is an open source distributed version control system (DVCS) that allows developers to work on the same project from anywhere and even if they’re offline. GitHub, GitLab and their alternatives are cloud services that provide remote hosting of Git repositories, as well as features such as task management, wikis, CI and more.

Let’s break it down further.

Introduction

I wanted to add an RSS feed to this blog but decided that instead of installing a dependency I’ll build one myself! Here’s how you can set one up in a Phoenix application:

Creating the RSS view

First let’s define a new route in lib/your_app_web/router.ex:

scope "/", YourAppWeb do
  ...

  get "/rss", RSSController, :index
end

Introduction

These are the configurations I use to deploy a Rails 6 app. Note that this is a small hobby app so I’m using docker-compose to deploy it, for more serious apps you’d want to use docker swarm or kubernetes.

If you don’t have a server ready or docker and docker-compose installed on your local dev machine then have a read through this blog post first.

For this build I’m not going to dockerize NGINX as I have it installed on the server.

Introduction

If you come from a Ruby on Rails background you might be used to having view helpers such as number_with_delimiter up your sleeve and ready to use in any view.

Here’s how to configure functions that are accessible in your Phoenix views:

1) Create a helper module

I usually create a helpers directory under the app_name_web directory. Next create a new module, let’s call it application_helper.ex:

The issue

The other day I ran my blog through GTmetrix website speed test and realised that I had turned on GZIP compression for static assets, but not for dynamic content. This is easily fixed however with 2 lines of code:

Enabling GZIP compression for static assets

To enable compression for static assets add gzip: true (or gzip: Mix.env == :prod for production only) to the Plug.Static config in lib/your_app_web/endpoint.ex:

Introduction

I had a couple of WordPress sites I wanted to dockerize and move over to my new server. This is the configuration I used to deploy them to my new server as described here.

I’m using the official wordpress and mysql images and don’t need to build anything, so all I need to deploy the app is a docker-compose.yml file and a couple of .env files.

The docker-compose.yml file

I’m using the wordpress:5.4.1 (also tagged as wordpress:5.4.1-apache) which uses an Apache server and serves the app on port 80. Port 8080 is mapped to my host.

Introduction

Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) is an open source web analytics application that runs on PHP and a MySQL database, which I’ve been using instead of Google Analytics.

This is the configuration I use to deploy it as described here.

I’m using the official matomo and mariadb images and don’t need to build anything, so all I need to deploy the app is a docker-compose.yml file and a .env file.

The issue

I recently ran into the following error when trying to deploy remotely using docker-compose:

ERROR: Secsh channel 14 open FAILED: open failed: Connect failed

The issue is that the default SSH connections allowed is set to 10 and the command I was running was trying to use more connections then that.

The issue

I recently ran into an issue after installing docker and adding it to the plugins section in my .zshrc file, autocomplete just wouldn’t work (even though oh-my-zsh plugin installation is so straightforward).

First make sure your syntax is OK, plugins should be separated by a space only and no commas:

plugins=(git docker docker-compose)

After reloading my zshrc file with source ~/.zshrc it still didn’t work. I had to delete ZSH’s .zcompdump file:

Introduction

These are the configurations I use for a Phoenix 1.4 app to deploy it to production using docker-compose contexts. If you don’t have a server ready or docker and docker-compose installed on your local dev machine then have a read through that blog post first.

For this build I’m not going to dockerize NGINX as I have it installed on the server.

Create a Dockerfile

Step one is to create a Dockerfile in the root directory of your project. For this build I’ll be using elixir:X.X.X-alpine image. alpine is a much slimmer Linux docker image and will reduce our overall image sizes.

Introduction

In this post we’ll go over setting up a DigitalOcean Droplet to run multiple dockerized apps which we’ll deploy to production using docker-compose and docker contexts. We’ll also set up NGINX reverse proxies for the apps we want to expose externally.

Using docker-compose with contexts lets us run builds and deployments to remote servers from our local dev machine. This feature is available to docker-compose starting with release 1.26.0-rc2.

Note: this feature is relatively easy to use, especially if you’ve used docker-contexts before however is more suited for deploying small/hobby apps to a single server. There will be some downtime as you’re releasing new builds (generally a few seconds) so if you require zero downtime deployments, rolling updates and multiple server orchestration then you should look at docker’s swarm feature or kubernetes.