TextDB Is a Simple Way to Share Small Amounts of Data

Feb 1, 2021

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

In this episode of Running in Production, Ian Davidson goes over building a data sharing service using Phoenix and Elixir. It’s using Live View too. At its peak the site received a spike of 10k+ requests in a day and it’s hosted on a $20 / month DigitalOcean server.

Ian talks about quickly building the app, reacting quickly to add user requested features, using DigitalOcean for the first time, some pitfalls of using Live View / websockets when it comes to configuring nginx and more.

Topics Include

1:35 – Motivation for using Phoenix, Elixir and Live View
4:14 – How the site works, it saves data to a combination of PostgreSQL and the file system
5:48 – The experience of developing the app with Phoenix Live View
8:42 – Adding features quickly based on user feedback
11:13 – It’s an open source monolithic code base sitting in 1 git repo on GitHub
14:43 – nginx is sitting in front of the cowboy server and terminals SSL
16:57 – It’s hosted on DigitalOcean for $20 / month (2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM)
18:56 – The OS is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and DigitalOcean’s automated backups are on
20:17 – The server was set up and configured manually without using Elixir releases too
22:36 – The deployment process from development to production
26:41 – The BEAM takes about 5 seconds to restart which is a bit of down time
28:50 – DigitalOcean’s Cloud Firewall is being used along with their monitoring tools
32:00 – nginx is taking care of basic rate limiting by IP address
34:20 – Best tips? Phoenix is a great choice for side projects but beware of websockets
36:11 – Not having end to end tests before launching was kind of a mistake
37:34 – Check out the site at https://textdb.dev/

Support the Show

This episode does not have a sponsor and this podcast is a labor of love. If you want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my courses or suggest one to a friend.

Dive into Docker is a video course that takes you from not knowing what Docker is to being able to confidently use Docker and Docker Compose for your own apps. Long gone are the days of "but it works on my machine!". A bunch of follow along labs are included.

Build a SAAS App with Flask is a video course where we build a real world SAAS app that accepts payments, has a custom admin, includes high test coverage and goes over how to implement and apply 50+ common web app features. There's over 20+ hours of video.

TextDB Is a Simple Way to Share Small Amounts of Data

Topics Include

Links

📄 References

⚙️ Tech Stack

🛠 Libraries Used

Support the Show