My personal webspace

A webspace for innovation, free thinking, and procrastination

This guide documents the steps I took to setup my Elixir/Phoenix/Docker environment on my Windows 10 machine. It might be worth nothing that I’m running Windows 10 Educational, which includes the Hyper-V supervisor; this is required for Docker.

Install Docker

Rather than repeat stuff here: go search Google, and follow the official guide.

This will probably require a restart.

Setup a Dockerfile and docker-compose file

To get started, we need a Dockerfile to build the web host. In addition to elixir, we will need NodeJS and some extras. This should do it:

FROM elixir
ADD . /code
WORKDIR /code
RUN mix archive.install --force https://github.com/phoenixframework/archives/raw/master/phx_new.ez
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y curl
RUN curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | bash -
RUN apt-get install -y nodejs
RUN apt-get install -y build-essential

This will build a basic Docker image for us to work out of; we will have to add the commands to download and install dependencies later.

And we need the docker-compose.yml file:

version: '3'
services:
  web:
    build: .
    ports:
      - "4000:4000"
    volumes:
      - .:/code
    depends_on:
      - db
  db:
    image: postgres

Good? Good. Now, build the image

< from the directory with the Dockerfile >
C:\Users\Charles\Programming\phoenix> docker build .
Sending build context to Docker daemon  34.82kB
Step 1/9 : FROM elixir
 ---> 16c13751747b
< Lots of output >
Successfully built d64e181690ba
SECURITY WARNING: You are building a Docker image from Windows against a non-Windows Docker host. All files and directories added to build context will have '-rwxr-xr-x' permissions. It is recommended to double check and reset permissions for sensitive files and directories.

Bring up the instance in one terminal, then connect to it in another.

C:\Users\Charles\Programming\phoenix>docker-compose up
< Lots of output >
web_1  | Interactive Elixir (1.6.4) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)

Great! Now, let’s generate our Phoenix project and get started!

Connect to the docker instance and follow the “Up and running” guide

To connect to the Docker instance in a shell, first run this command to find the instance ID:

C:\Users\Charles\Programming\mtb>docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                    NAMES
3f50c1a9ba4a        phoenix_web             "iex"                    16 minutes ago      Up 16 minutes       0.0.0.0:4000->4000/tcp   mtb_web_1
ffc0f77a8dce        postgres            "docker-entrypoint.s…"   38 minutes ago      Up 17 minutes       5432/tcp                 mtb_db_1

We are interested in the phoenix_web image (the name may vary), specifically the CONTAINER ID (in this case, 3f50…)

C:\Users\Charles\Programming\mtb> docker exec -ti 3f50c1a9ba4a /bin/bash
root@3f50c1a9ba4a:/code##

Huzzah! A Linux prompt! Let the fun begin; follow the Phoenix setup directions, with one key caveat; when running mix phx.new, use this: mix phx.new . --module MyApp and type ‘y’ when prompted.

Once the app is generated, lets modify the Dockerfile to pull in the dependencies as needed. At the time of writing, Phoenix was still using Brunch, but promises a transition to webpack soon.

new Dockerfile:

FROM elixir
ADD . /code
WORKDIR /code
RUN mix archive.install --force https://github.com/phoenixframework/archives/raw/master/phx_new.ez
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y curl
RUN curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | bash -
RUN apt-get install -y nodejs
RUN apt-get install -y build-essential
RUN mix local.hex --force
RUN mix deps.get
RUN mix local.rebar --force
RUN cd assets && npm install && node node_modules/brunch/bin/brunch build
RUN cd ..
RUN mix deps.compile

Bring down the old instance by hitting “Ctrl+C” in that terminal, then rerun docker build ..

Setup the database

Last thing, I swear. By default, Phoenix is configred to look at localhost for the database. In Docker, the database can be found at hostname db; we need to update config/dev.exs (towards the bottom, under the comment saying “Configure your database”). We also need to remove the password, since the Docker postgres image doesn’t ship with one.

After your image is up, you should run mix ecto.create from inside the instance. This can not be done in the Dockerfile since it requires the database host to be alive. Migrating your database will also become part of your day-to-day activities, so plan on learning the commands anyway :).

Change the default run command

Right now, the image is setup to IEX when it comes up. We need it to do a bit more than that. We want it to run iex -S mix phx.server when it comes online. To do this, modify docker-compose.yml:

version: '3'
services:
  web:
    build: .
    command: iex -S mix phx.server
    ports:
      - "4000:4000"
    volumes:
      - .:/code
    depends_on:
      - db
  db:
    image: postgres

Hopefully you now have a prompt to IEX>, and if you open a web browser, you can access http://localhost:4000/

The Good Stuff

One of the really cool things Elixir can do that others can not is hot-code reloading, and allowing multiple command interfaces for a single node (to inspect state and what not). To get that working, you need to setup a session name and a cookie for each session which is going operate in the same “universe”. To do this, pass the --sname <somename> and --cookie <some secret> options to iex, like so (in docker-compose.yml):

    command: iex --sname compose --cookie nom -S mix phx.server

Then, from a shell, run:

root@d04082431ec9:/code## iex --sname client --cookie nom --remsh compose@d04082431ec9
Erlang/OTP 20 [erts-9.3] [source] [64-bit] [smp:2:2] [ds:2:2:10] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]

Interactive Elixir (1.6.4) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)
iex(compose@d04082431ec9)1>

And you can do cool stuff.

Thanks for reading, feel free to comment!


Content © 2022 Charles Hathaway