Installation on a Heroku server

The _magpie server app can be hosted on any hosting service or your own server. We here describe the process for installation on Heroku.

Heroku makes it easy to deploy a web app without having to manually manage the infrastructure. It has a free starter tier, which should be sufficient for the purpose of running experiments. If Heroku doesn’t satisfy your needs, you may take a look at Gigalixir, an alternative free hosting service built for Elixir. Or you may want to deploy the app on your own server.

There is an official guide from the Phoenix framework on deploying on Heroku. The deployment procedure is based on this guide, but differs in some places.

  1. Ensure that you have the Phoenix Framework installed and working. (However, if you just want to deploy this server and do no development work/change on it at all, you may skip this step.)

  2. Ensure that you have a Heroku account already, and have the Heroku CLI installed and working on your computer.

  3. Ensure you have Git installed. Clone this git repo with git clone https://github.com/magpie-ea/magpie-backend or git clone git@github.com:magpie-ea/magpie-backend.git.

  4. cd into the project directory just cloned from your Terminal (or cmd.exe on Windows).

  5. Run heroku create --buildpack "https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir.git".

  6. Run heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/gjaldon/heroku-buildpack-phoenix-static.git.

    (N.B.: Although the command line output tells you to run git push heroku master, don’t do it yet.)

  7. Run heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/chrismcg/heroku-buildpack-elixir-mix-release.

  8. You may want to change the application name instead of using the default name. In that case, run heroku apps:rename newname.

  9. Run heroku config:set HOST="[app_name].herokuapp.com" where [app_name] is the app name (shown when you first ran heroku create, e.g. mysterious-meadow-6277, or the app name that you set at the previous step, e.g. newname).

  10. Run

    heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev
heroku config:set POOL_SIZE=18 PORT=443

  11. Run mix deps.get then mix phx.gen.secret. Then run heroku config:set SECRET_KEY_BASE="OUTPUT", where OUTPUT should be the output of the mix phx.gen.secret step.

    Note: If you don’t have Phoenix framework installed on your computer, you may choose to use some other random generator for this step, which essentially asks for a random 64-character secret. On Mac and Linux, you may run openssl rand -base64 64. Or you may use an online password generator such as the one offered by LastPass.

  12. By default, the app is accessible without authentication. If you want to protect the app with basic auth, first run ``. Set the environment variables AUTH_USERNAME and AUTH_PASSWORD for authentication, either in the Heroku web interface or via the command line, i.e.

    heroku config:set AUTH_USERNAME="your_username" AUTH_PASSWORD="your_password"

  13. Run git push heroku master. This will push the master branch of the repo to the git remote at Heroku, and deploy the app.

  14. Run heroku run "_build/prod/rel/magpie/bin/magpie eval 'Magpie.ReleaseTasks.db_migrate()'" (Note the ' in the command).

  15. Now, heroku open should open the frontpage of the app.