Flyby

An experiment in self-hosting multiple Phoenix applications on a basic Digital Ocean droplet¹. Only a fool would use this for a mission-critical application.

Motivation

PaaS solutions such as Fly.io are great for serious applications. If that's what you're building, you should use such a service.

For dumb side-projects, Fly isn't so great. The free tier can handle a basic Phoenix application, but beyond that things get very pricey, very quickly.

Flyby is an attempt to fill this gap. You can set it up on a $20 / month DO droplet, and host as many dumb Phoenix applications as your heart desires. Probably. I have no idea, it's an experiment.

Quick start

1. Create an Ubuntu 22.10 Digital Ocean droplet. I've been using a 2GB / 2 AMD CPU droplet, but you could probably get away with less.
2. SSH into your fancy new faux server.
3. Clone this repository: git clone git@github.com:monooso/flyby.git.
4. Run the bootstrap script: cd flyby && bash bootstrap.sh.
5. Set the environment variables (see below).
6. Launch your digital empire: docker compose up -d.

Environment variables

Copy the docker.env.example file to docker.env. Set the DEFAULT_EMAIL environment variable to a valid email address. If something goes awry with your SSL certificates Let's Encrypt will send an email to this address.

Managing sites

Adding a site

cd ~
git clone git@github.com:mycoolusername/mycoolsite.git

# Build the site. Accepts the directory name, and the generated image name.
# The generated image name should match the `app` image name in the site's `docker-compose.yml`.
# Do not include the tag (we always use `latest`).
flyby build mycoolsite mycoolusername/mycoolsite

# Start the site. Runs `docker compose -f ./mycoolsite/docker-compose.yml up -d`.
flyby start mycoolsite

Updating a site

cd ~
flyby update mycoolsite mycoolusername/mycoolsite

Footnotes

1. Other hosting companies are available. I've only tried this on Digital Ocean, but there's no reason why it wouldn't work on Hetzner, Linode, etc. ↩