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Deploying Elixir Book

26 points by miguelcoba 5y ago

miguelcoba 5y ago
This is my Deploying Elixir ebook. It is free, just put a zero on the price field. Enjoy.
throwaway81523 5y ago
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.
- miguelcoba 5y ago
  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 https://github.com/miguelcoba/saturn Hope you find this book useful.
weatherlite 5y ago
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.
- smorgusofborg 5y ago
  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.
- weatherlight 5y ago
  ^ please don't feed the trolls https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1479160925349462019/photo/1 https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1479160925349462019/pho...
- AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  > 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.
  - miguelcoba 5y ago
    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.
    - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
      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.

26 points by miguelcoba 5y ago

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.

miguelcoba 5y ago
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 https://github.com/miguelcoba/saturn Hope you find this book useful.

weatherlite 5y ago

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.

smorgusofborg 5y ago
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.
weatherlight 5y ago
^ please don't feed the trolls https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1479160925349462019/photo/1 https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1479160925349462019/pho...
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
> 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.
- miguelcoba 5y ago
  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.
  - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
    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.