- 03 May, 2020
This month we switched the website of Byteflip from a static HTML site to a dynamic application written in Elixir with Phoenix Framework. It enables us (me in particular, Jaroslav is more into Ruby) to do a couple of things:
- Easier maintenance. Although one might think - what could be easier than maintaining a static site, ours wasn’t done with a site generator. It was just 1 HTML file, 1 CSS, 1 JS and some images. Editing it was not fun, probably the reason why I never did it.
- New features. For example this blog. I copied the setup from the fine folks at Dashbit and I love the simplicity it gives me.
- Play with cool new tech, like Phoenix LiveView. LiveView is just a joy to work with and even though our site and blog don’t really need it - I couldn’t resist.
- Improve my skills in DevOps. When deploying Elixir applications for my clients, there were always some OPS people to assist me. I have a good idea how it’s done and I have hosted production Rails applications before, but to host an Elixir app requires some extra tricks.
How our setup is done and how to deploy an Elixir application with GitLab CI is a topic for another blog post. What I also want to write about is - cookieless setup. If you open your browser console, you’ll notice that there are no cookies on our site. Why it is like that and how to configure it is also something I want to write about in the near future. Stay tuned.