Phoenix Prototype app

A convenience skeleton project for Phoenix.

• Phoenix
• Postgrex
• Slim
• Wallaby
• ExMachina
• Yarn
• Sass
• Bootstrap
• additional acceptance environment
• CI testing via CircleCI
• .iex.exs for REPL aliases & imports
• ready for deployment to Heroku Pipelines in acceptance and prod environments.

Getting started

After you've cloned the app, perform global replacements for these with your app name:

• HappyTreesServer
• happy_trees_server
• happytreesserver
• Happy Trees Server

Also rename the following directories & files:

• /lib/happy_trees_server
• /web/static/css/_happy_trees_server.scss
• /web/static/js/happy_trees_server.js

Now you can finish your setup & verify things are working:

• mix deps.get
• mix ecto.setup
• yarn install
• brunch build
• mix test

Running the server

Each environment is responsible for setting the SECRET_KEY_BASE. With the exception of the test environment, this value is derived from a system environment variable.

To set environment variables locally for the dev environment, you can create a .env file & run the server with a tool that reads .env. I recommend heroku local to mirror production more closely, or foreman.

Sample .env file

MIX_ENV="dev"
SECRET_KEY_BASE="xxxxxx"

SECRET_KEY_BASE can be generated with the task mix phoenix.gen.secret.

As a convenience, a weak SECRET_KEY_BASE is hard-coded in the test environment. You can easily change this to read an env var a la the other environments instead.

Give it a spin:

• mix phoenix.server
• visit the app in a browser (default is http://localhost:4000, or http://127.0.0.1:4000 in some versions of Chrome)

Now you're ready to remove demo content, which is easy to spot from the landing page.

Requirements

• phantomjs is required for acceptance testing with Wallaby, i.e. yarn global add phantomjs. Lean more about wallaby

Recommendations

• If you use asdf, you'll be set up with the correct versions of node and elixir once they're installed. Otherwise, have a look at .tool-versions to see the current versions.

Deployment

This app is pre-configured for easy deployment to Heroku w/ pipelines using CircleCI. CI is only used to run tests; your pipelines should be configured to auto-deploy branches after passing CI tests.

Convention is to auto-deploy master branch to acceptance, and production branch to prod.

• Create Heroku apps for acceptance and production
• Provision Heroku Postgres DB resources
• Add buildpacks to Heroku apps
  • heroku buildpacks:add "https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir.git"
  • heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/gjaldon/heroku-buildpack-phoenix-static.git
• Add environment variables to Heroku
  • SECRET_KEY_BASE, which can be generated with the task mix phoenix.gen.secret
  • MIX_ENV should be acceptance and prod respectively
  • POOL_SIZE should be set 2 units below the max db connections allowed by the Heroku instance. This allows mix tasks to be run with 2 connections.
  • DATABASE_URL should have been filled automatically by provisioning heroku postgres.

Notes

• You will see warnings from several dependencies the first time they're compiled. This is because many of them have not yet been upgraded for elixir 1.4; these can be safely ignored.
• There's a decent chance you'll eventually want a production environment with more control & power. Heroku is currently the simplest way to get up & running for prototyping, and may even suit your app just fine long term.
• Razor should be used for convenience, not to avoid learning more about Phoenix and Elixir. Please take the time to learn about the opinions provided by Razor & how they are implemented.

Learn more about Phoenix

• Official website: http://www.phoenixframework.org/
• Guides: http://phoenixframework.org/docs/overview
• Docs: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix
• Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/phoenix-talk
• Source: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix