• Swanye
  • Getting started
    • For Guix Users
    • Production Deployment
    • Environment Variables
  • Other places to find us
  • Learn more about Phoenix

Swanye

A tumblelog in the style of Tumblr.

Swanye is still incredibly pre-alpha software; it is highly unrecommended to run Swanye in anything other than a local setup, at this point in time.

Getting started

Swanye relies on a few dependencies:

• Elixir
• Node (for development, generating SASS files to CSS)
• MariaDB

In order to run Swanye, make sure you have these installed; basic, out-of-the-box configuration should suffice to get Swanye working. Do remember to create a user, in your database, for the username and password defined under config/dev.exs.

With those installed, – to start your Phoenix server –:

• Install dependencies with mix deps.get
• Create and migrate your database with mix ecto.setup

• Install Node.js dependencies with npm install inside the assets directory

  • this is primarily to run the SASS monitor when developing which will build the CSS files we need for production
  • JavaScript will be handled by Phoenix's esbuild
• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000">localhost:4000 from your browser.

Ready to run in production? Please check Phoenix's deployment guides.

For Guix Users

Because mix will try to build certain dependencies locally, you will need the packages make and gcc-toolchain; you will also need to prefix CC=gcc for mix commands as it will look for cc before gcc, as well.

In order for Elixir to monitor the system as it runs, it will complain about a lack of inotify-tools and the RsaEx dependency will expect for openssl to be executable for it.

For now, running guix shell elixir node mariadb make gcc-toolchain inotify-tools openssl should be sufficient to get you up and running, I think (without polluting your profile with dependencies you probably don't want to keep).

I am hoping to create a Guix file so you can just run guix shell from the root of the project and not worry about the details but haven't found the time, yet.

Production Deployment

Currently, I've been deploying this code via Heroku. I've been using the buildpacks Heroku Buildpack Elixir and Phoenix Static Buildpack.

The relevant files for the first buildpack are Procfile and elixir_buildpack.config. Procfile sets which environment is being used and holds the command to start the project. elixir_buildpack.config's most relevant bits are setting the versions of both Erlang and Elixir.

The relevant files for the second buildpack is compile, overwriting the default compile script of Phoenix Static Buildpack. The main difference from the default script is using mix "assets.deploy" instead of mix "${phoenix_ex}.digest".

The SASS and JavaScript files under assets (in /css and /js, respectively) need to be generated so the processes handled by the files, above, need to be ensured if you try to run this code outside of a Heroku (with the aforementioned buildpacks) environment/situation.

Environment Variables

While MariaDB variables are already hardcoded so that the don't need to be provided to connect to a database when running locally, the variables MAILGUN_API_KEY and MAILGUN_DOMAIN must be provided for E-mail functionality. Currently, Swanye is setup to use Mailgun to send E-mails; obviously, providing greater choice (and, hopefully, more libre options) is a desire, for the future.

DREAM_OBJECTS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and DREAM_OBJECTS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY can be provided to test image uploading and storage usage; you must have a DreamObjects account for this, however.

Production environment variables in use are:

• DREAM_OBJECTS_ACCESS_KEY_ID – DreamObjects ID, for image storage
• DREAM_OBJECTS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY – DreamObjects Secret, for image storage
• MARIADB_USERNAME – MariaDB username for database access
• MARIADB_PASSWORD – MariaDB password for database access
• MARIADB_HOST – MariaDB host/domain for database access
• MARIADB_DATABASE – MariaDB database name for database access
• SECRET_KEY_BASE – Used by Phoenix; generate with mix phx.gen.secret
• MAILGUN_API_KEY – Your Mailgun-given API key
• MAILGUN_DOMAIN – The Mailgun domain of your Mailgun account
• PHX_HOST (for Prod.) – The domain of your site
• PORT (optional) – The port you need your application to connect to, if not 4000

Other places to find us

If you want to follow for updates about the development progress, general updates (including my thoughts about new features and how development is going) can be found at our Mastodon account.

If you're interested in helping support me so I can work on Swanye, the project also has a Liberapay.

Learn more about Phoenix

• Official website: https://www.phoenixframework.org/
• Guides: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html
• Docs: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix
• Forum: https://elixirforum.com/c/phoenix-forum
• Source: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix