Introduction to Erlang/OTP production applications deployment

Question

I would like to develop and deploy an Erlang/OTP application into production on a VPS.

I am pretty familiar with developing Erlang code on a local machine and my question is about deployment.

Basically, I would like to know what steps I should take in order to move Erlang code from a local machine to a production server and make it run, i.e. be available for users.

Note: I have read some documentation about Erlang and command line, Erlang code module, Erlang releases, but I am still not sure how to pursue the required task.

However, I guess that deploying an Erlang-based software on a server is a bit more tricky than doing sudo tasksel for LAMP.

I plan to have an Erlang/OTP application which has Mochiweb, CouchDB (couchbeam) and boss_db as dependencies.

So, my newbie questions about deploying all that stuff on a production server are the following:

• I plan to use Ubuntu Server 12.04; is there any better choice for a Linux distro to use for Erlang/OTP in production?
• How all the code should be organized? Should I put my application into a /home/myapp/ dir and then put all the dependencies into /home/myapp/deps? Or should I put all dependencies into /usr/local/lib/erlang/lib? (returned by code:get_path()). Should I somehow update the dependencies regularly or should I freeze them?
• How do I make the whole application start once the server starts? Should it be some kind of bash script or anything else?
• I know that Erlang allows hot code upgrades, but how should I organize that? On Rails I could update the code with git, does anything similar exist in the Erlang world?

Answer 1

There are two types of dependencies: Internal and External. If you want to do it the right way(tm), it takes a bit of time getting to work:

External dependencies:

Taking the latter first, an external dependency is some other thing that has to run before your application can run. For instance a PostgreSQL database, or a Riak cluster. For those, you usually just use the usual stuff in Ubuntu for making it start up properly. I've had good experience with using monit for these tasks:

http://mmonit.com/monit/

Internal Dependencies:

For internal dependencies, you need to arrange your program into applications inside the Erlang VM. These have dependencies on each other, like the external dependencies. Your main application may need a logger running before it should start, for instance. Then you create a release. A release copies the Erlang binaries and necessary libraries/beams/applications into a release directory, forming a self-contained Erlang system. It contains a boot-script which tells how to start up the applications in the right order and keep them running. So you can tar-ball up this release, copy it to the server and then start it. There are some basics covered here:

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/release-is-the-word

but do also read the chapters before it on applications. You can also get rebar to call reltool for you to build a release. This is what I usually do.

Hot upgrades:

Handling hot upgrades in production can be done in a couple of ways. You can move the beam to the machine and then deploy it, take the shell and then call l(Module) to load it into the running system. This works for smaller fixes. For large systematic upgrades you can do a release-upgrade which will upgrade the running system on the fly without stopping service. But if your system is mostly shared nothing, it is usually not worth it. Instead, you can have multiple machines and upgrade them in sequence.

For instance, you can upgrade a machine and then use a system like HAProxy to send 2% of all requests to the new system. Then systematically turn up the request load weight.

Answer 2

While @I GIVE CRAP ANSWERS gave a pretty thorough summary, I feel compelled to throw in the use of sync, which helps to automate the hot-recompiling and reloading of modules.

The simple way is you specify sync as a rebar dependency, then when you're getting ready to deploy an upgrade, you can run sync:go() on the Erlang node. This starts the sync engine, which watches for filesystem changes. Then you can use git to push to your server. Sync will notice the files change, recompile them, and load the new beams automatically.

Then, you can run sync:stop() right away to tell the system to stop watching for filesystem changes (it's generally not recommended to keep sync running on a live server, just to prevent accidental recompiling if, for whatever reason, a source file changes and it's unintentional.