Elixir

Upsun supports building and deploying applications written in Elixir. There is no default flavor for the build phase, but you can define it explicitly in your build hook. Upsun Elixir images support both committed dependencies and download-on-demand. The underlying Erlang version is 22.0.7.

Supported versions

You can select the major and minor version.

Patch versions are applied periodically for bug fixes and the like. When you deploy your app, you always get the latest available patches.

• 1.15
• 1.14

Specify the language

To use Elixir, specify elixir as your app’s type:

applications:
  # The app's name, which must be unique within the project.
  <APP_NAME>:
    type: 'elixir:<VERSION_NUMBER>'

For example:

applications:
  # The app's name, which must be unique within the project.
  myapp:
    type: 'elixir:1.15'

Built-in variables

Upsun exposes relationships and other configuration as environment variables. Most notably, it allows a program to determine at runtime what HTTP port it should listen on and what the credentials are to access other services.

To get the PORT environment variable (the port on which your web application is supposed to listen) you would:

String.to_integer(System.get_env("PORT") || "8888")

Some of the environment variables are in JSON format and are base64 encoded. You would need to import a JSON parsing library such as JSON or Poison to read those. (There is an example for doing this to decode the PLATFORM_RELATIONSHIPS environment variable in the section below.)

Building and running the application

If you are using Hex to manage your dependencies, you need to specify the MIX_ENV environment variable:

applications:
  myapp:
    type: 'elixir:1.15'
    variables:
      env:
        MIX_ENV: 'prod'

The SECRET_KEY_BASE variable is generated automatically based on the PLATFORM_PROJECT_ENTROPY variable. You can change it.

Include in your build hook the steps to retrieve a local Hex and rebar, and then run mix do deps.get, deps.compile, compile on your application to build a binary.

applications:
  myapp:
    type: 'elixir:1.15'
    hooks:
      build: |
        mix local.hex --force
        mix local.rebar --force
        mix do deps.get --only prod, deps.compile, compile        

Assuming mix.exs is present at your app root and your build hook matches the above, you can then start it from the web.commands.start directive.

The following basic app configuration is sufficient to run most Elixir applications.

applications:
  myapp:
    type: 'elixir:1.15'

    variables:
      env:
        MIX_ENV: 'prod'

    hooks:
      build: |
        mix local.hex --force
        mix local.rebar --force
        mix do deps.get --only prod, deps.compile, compile        

    web:
      commands:
        start: mix phx.server
      locations:
        /:
          allow: false
          passthru: true

Note that there is still an Nginx proxy server sitting in front of your application. If desired, certain paths may be served directly by Nginx without hitting your application (for static files, primarily) or you may route all requests to the Elixir application unconditionally, as in the example above.

Dependencies

The recommended way to handle Elixir dependencies on Upsun is using Hex. You can commit a mix.exs file in your repository and the system downloads the dependencies in your deps section using the build hook above.

  defp deps do
    [
	  {:platformshconfig, "~> 0.1.0"}
    ]
  end

Accessing Services

You can access service credentials to connect to managed services from environment variables present in the application container. Consult each of the individual service documentation to see how to retrieve and surface credentials into your application.

• ClickHouse

• Elasticsearch

• Gotenberg

• Headless Chrome

• InfluxDB

• Kafka

• MariaDB/MySQL

• Memcached

• MongoDB

• Network Storage

• OpenSearch

• PostgreSQL

• RabbitMQ

• Redis

• Solr

• Varnish

• Vault KMS

Accessing Services Manually

The services configuration is available in the environment variable PLATFORM_RELATIONSHIPS.

Given a relationship defined in .upsun/config.yaml:

applications:
  myapp:
    type: 'elixir:1.15'

    [...]

    # Relationships enable an app container's access to a service.
    # The example below shows simplified configuration leveraging a default service
    # (identified from the relationship name) and a default endpoint.
    # See the Application reference for all options for defining relationships and endpoints.
    relationships:
      postgresql:

Assuming you have in mix.exs the Poison library to parse JSON:

  defp deps do
    [
      {:poison, "~> 3.0"}
    ]
  end

And assuming you use ecto you could put in config/config.exs:

relationships = Poison.decode!(Base.decode64!(System.get_env("PLATFORM_RELATIONSHIPS")))
[postgresql_config | _tail] = relationships["postgresql"]

config :my_app, Repo,
  database: postgresql_config["path"],
  username: postgresql_config["username"],
  password: postgresql_config["password"],
  hostname: postgresql_config["host"]

and setup Ecto during the deploy hook:

applications:
  myapp:
    hooks:
      deploy: |
        mix do ecto.setup