🚀Creating a web app from start to finish
Follow a step by step guide to creating a reminders web application using the Petal Pro boilerplate. We will cover everything from setup to deploying to production.
Last updated
Follow a step by step guide to creating a reminders web application using the Petal Pro boilerplate. We will cover everything from setup to deploying to production.
Last updated
Note: This tutorial was written using Petal Pro v1.4.0.
For this tutorial you will need:
Access to Petal Pro (you can purchase it on petal.build)
Elixir & Erlang installed (you can follow our installation guide to get up and running)
PostgreSQL running: Postgres.app works well for Mac or we have a docker-compose.yaml file that will run Postgres for you
For deployment (optional) you will need:
An account on Fly.io
An Amazon Web Services account with Simple Email Service (SES) for emails (you can replace with another service if you like - it just won't be covered in this guide)
Head to the downloads page and download v1.4.0. You can unzip it in your terminal with the command unzip petal_pro_1.4.0.zip.
Once it's unzipped we can go ahead and rename the folder to whatever we want to call it. In our case, we're going to call it "remindly".
While this changes the folder name, we still need to change the name of all the files and module names (eg. petal_pro_web.ex should be remindly_web.ex, etc). Petal Pro allows you to easily rename your project with a bash script. Open up rename_phoenix_project.sh and you'll see some instructions:
Let's follow these instructions in our terminal:
Now, let's put our desired name ("remindly") into the script:
And finally, run the script:
If it produces no output, then you know it's run correctly. You can verify by looking at your git changes - there should be a lot of changes and file renaming.
For Linux users: as per the instructions you will need to do an additional task - simply follow the instructions in the script
If you like you can commit this renaming to git so you have a fresh starting point.
Let's get the server running so we can see Petal Pro in action. Simply run in your terminal:
And now navigate to http://localhost:4000 in your browser to see the dummy landing page:
Feel free to have a look around. The mix setup command helpfully ran our seeds.ex file, which if you open you will see this code:
The UserSeeder.admin() command has created an admin for us. You can sign in as this admin with "admin@example.com" and the password "password". We won't explain too much here, as you'll touch on different parts of Petal Pro throughout different parts of this tutorial.
Run mix test to run the tests. They should be all green.
Petal Pro also comes with some end-to-end (E2E) tests (see signup_test.exs). It doesn't run as part of the normal test suite because it's a bit slow.
In order for E2E tests to work, you will need to install Chromedriver, which will run the tests like you were clicking things in a browser. On a Mac you can install it with:
Then to run the E2E tests run mix test --only feature. Or you could use our alias mix wallaby (see aliases defined in mix.exs).
On Mac, you may get the error:
Error: “chromedriver” cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified. Unable to launch the chrome browser
If this happens, you can run this command:
Obviously, the Petal branding will need to be replaced by your own brand. If you do a global search for "SETUP_TODO" you will find the code you need to modify.
The first two mentions you can ignore; one is in the README which is similar to this tutorial. The other is in rename_phoenix_project.sh, which we've already done. The 3rd match is in our config.exs file. Here we can update our web apps details:
The next SETUP_TODO is found in the file brand.ex.
You don't need to change anything in this file, but rather it's asking you to update the logos with your own. For this tutorial, I went into Figma and just wrote "Remindly" in an interesting font. You can duplicate my Figma file and replace with your logo if you like.
The first 4 logos should be SVG. You can select them and export as SVG:
The rest can all be exported PNG.
Once you've exported them all you can drag them into your project:
Note that in case you missed it - since emails can be opened in all kinds of email clients, the logo must be hosted online somewhere.
I recommend uploading your logo in png format to some kind of image hosting you like. We personally like Cloudinary so let's upload our logo and then paste the URL into our config file. After you've done this, you can just paste the link in and your emails should reflect your new logo. We'll also discuss this later in the "Reminder emails" section of this tutorial.
Now reload your browser and check out your new logo.
The other two SETUP_TODO's are to do with adding your license and privacy policy content as most SAAS applications will require them. You can add this content in pure markdown and we've provided some dummy content as an example to get you started.
Petal Components relies heavily on having a primary and secondary brand color set in your tailwind.config.js file.
By default, primary is blue and secondary is pink:
You can pick any two colors from Taildwind's comprehensive list. Or if you want to go custom, you can try out this site.
In our case, we'll go for the colors "amber" and "slate":
If you refresh your landing page, you'll notice the color change.
The landing page consists of content from two core files:
lib/remindly_web/components/landing_page.ex - a set of components like <.hero>, <.features>, <.header> etc. The end goal of Petal Pro is to have a comprehensive set of landing page components that can be used as building blocks for your landing page. Ideally, you won't modify these too much but will use them just like Petal Components. For now, you can modify them as you wish.
/lib/remindly_web/templates/page/landing_page.html.heex - a template file that uses the components from landing_page.ex
To keep this tutorial moving quickly, we won't do much design work on the landing page - if you open up landing_page.html.heex we can strip it down to merely a hero component:
Now refresh your landing page and it should be a lot more simple. It is up to you how detailed you want to be with your landing page.
To complement the landing page it would be nice to have an "About" page. This is a good chance to show off Petal Pro's "Page Builder" functionality.
Usually, when you want to create a new page, you would have to create a new template file or live view file. Then you would create a route and point it either to the template's corresponding controller action or directly to the live view which all takes valuable minutes. To skip these steps, we made it so that if you navigate to a path with no route on it then it will show what we call "The Page Builder" 👏.
The Page Builder is simply a form that helps you construct a page at that route. Submitting the form will result in the route being automatically added to the router.ex file and either a template or live view file is created for you.
Let's try it out. In your browser go to "localhost:4000/about". This page won't exist so the "Page Builder" will load up. Here is where we can input the details of our new page.
We'll make a change before submitting: for "Page type", change to "Traditional static view" - we won't be needing any live view functionality.
After submitting the form the page should refresh itself because the about.html.heex template file has been added to the file system. The "Page Builder" has done 3 things for us:
Added a new "/about" route in router.ex
Added a new about/2 function in page_controller.ex
Added a new template about.html.heex
Now it should look more like our landing page. Obviously, it looks unfinished, but we've shown how you can use "Page Builder" to speed up your development for these stray pages.
How does the Page Builder know where to insert the route? If you look inside the router.ex file, you will see some comments spread out through the file that looks like this: page_builder:live:public . Any comment like this is like a target for the Page Builder to add routes beneath it. When you load the Page Builder it will scan the router for these strings starting with "page_builder:" and then allow you to select one of them from a list. Whichever one you select, the route will be added AFTER that line.
You can add more route targets that Page Builder will pick up - just write a comment in the format page_builder:<type>:<name>. The type must be live or static. The name can be whatever you like, eg: pagebuilder:live:my_special_routes.
Let's change our menu items to include this about page. The public menu can be found in the file menus.ex in a function public_menu_items/1. Modify it to this:
And now there should be a menu item in the navbar:
You can learn more about menus here.
Now that the public-facing side of things is looking good enough, we can work on the app itself.
When a user signs in we want them to see a list of their reminders that they can check off or delete, with a button to create new ones. Normally this would be a job for a Phoenix generator - luckily Petal Pro has its own version of the mix phx.gen.live generator - mix petal.gen.live. Our generator produces the same files as the Phoenix one, but the resulting HTML will use Tailwind and Petal Components so we don't have to worry about styling.
Let's run the generator to create the following schema:
label
:string
due_date
:date
is_done
:boolean
user_id
:integer (foreign key)
The command will output the routes needed to make the new pages work. Highlight them and just copy them to your clipboard for now.
Let's run the migration the generator just created:
Now we need to add these routes to the router. We can use the Page Builder tags to help us know where to put them. Do a search for "page_builder:live:authenticated" to see live routes that require a logged in user.
Let's paste the routes we copied from the generator command below that line.
Since it's in a protected area, we'll have to sign in before being able to reach this new page. Click the sign-in button in the top right dropdown:
Sign in as admin:
Email: admin@example.com
Password: password
Upon your first sign in you will be greeted with an onboarding screen.
Showing this screen is determined by the user field user.is_onboarded.
All new users have this defaulted to false, and thus will see this screen thanks to the plug :onboard_new_users that redirects to this page if user.is_onboarded == false.
Over time you might add more onboarding fields like "Where did you hear about us?" or "How many people are in your company?".
Onboarding can be switched off by removing the :onboard_new_users plug from all pipelines in the router.
Just hit submit to get through this. You will then be shown a dashboard that we will ignore.
Manually navigate to "http://localhost:4000/app/reminders" to see the newly created CRUD functionality.
One issue with the generator is that it doesn't handle foreign keys very well. Currently, the reminders page shows reminders from ALL users. In fact, the reminder.user_id is not even being set when creating a new reminder, so they're not really owned by anyone - every user who signs in will see them. We need to make it so everything is scoped to the currently signed-in user:
the index page table should only show the current users' reminders
when you create a new reminder, it should set the user_id to the current user's id
the show page should not be allowed to see other user's reminders
Firstly, there are a couple of problems with the schema file:
Let's fix those up:
Note that we've added :user_id to the validate_required function too, as we always want a reminder to belong to someone.
The reminder schema now knows it belongs to a user, but we still have to let the user schema know that it "has_many" reminders. Let's add that to the user schema file:
Great, the association is now complete. Now let's make it so that when you create a new reminder, the user_id gets populated with the signed-in user's id.
The code for creating the reminder is located in lib/remindly_web/live/reminder_live/form_component.ex :
Let's modify this to ensure the :user_id is set in the params:
Now when you try and create a new reminder, unfortunately you get an error:
The current_user isn't in socket.assigns. This can be confusing because it is usually in the socket's assigns thanks to Petal Pro setting it in user_on_mount_hooks.ex.
The reason it isn't in this case is that form_component.ex is a live_component, not a live_view. Thus it has its own state and it's up to us to pass any assigns into it. We can see in index.html.heex the assigns being passed into it:
So all we need to do is pass in the current_user to this live_component function:
And now creating a new reminder works correctly 🎊.
The next problem is that the date picker starts too far in the past - ideally it'll show today's date. So let's add a default date for the form. This also will be done in the RemindlyWeb.ReminderLive.Index live view (index.ex). We can modify the existing function, so it looks like this:
We use the Timex library (included in Petal Pro) to get today's date. Now the default is set correctly when creating new reminders (although since we're using UTC time, it may be 1 day off depending on where you live, but good enough for this tutorial).
The "Is done" column with true or false is a bit ugly.
Let's move it to the front column and make it a checkbox. Working in the file index.html.heex, let's begin by rearranging the headers:
Next, we'll rearrange the table cells and also add a checkbox in the first cell. Since we want it to submit every time we modify the checkbox, we'll wrap it in a form and add a phx-change event listener on it. So every time the form changes an event will be sent to the live view.
Now we just need to create the event handler for "toggle_reminder". Add this event handler underneath the event handler for "delete":
Now our checkbox is in sync. Live view works so fast that you can barely notice it's not a Single Page App. However, this won't always be the case once if someone is a long way from the server and has some latency.
With LiveView you can simulate latency. If you look in app.js you'll find a comment with a command to run the in the browser console. This will add 1 second of latency: liveSocket.enableLatencySim(1000).
It feels the same, but you can see the delay more clearly with the console open. LiveView adds classes when it's performing some kind of communication with the server. Petal Pro comes with some helper classes "show-if-loading" and "hide-if-loading" that we can make use of. Let's hide the checkbox button and show a spinner until LiveView has saved the update in the database:
With that working correctly, we can disable the latency in the browser console: liveSocket.disableLatencySim().
In Petal Pro we try to keep our menu items all following the same data structure (name, label, path, and icon, which refers to a Heroicon). Menu items can be constructed on the fly, but if it's commonly used we can store them in menus.ex. This file is like a small database for menu items. It also can omit menu items if a user doesn't have the right privileges (eg. admin menu items).
Each menu item has a function that looks like this:
The icon is passed directly HeroiconsV1.Outline.renderlike this: <HeroiconsV1.Outline.render icon={menu_item.icon} />. You can browse Heroicons (make sure you set it to v1 in the dropdown, as that's only what our menu system supports at the moment) and when you've found the one you like, just write the atom version of it. For example, the icon "bookmark-alt" would be :bookmark_alt.
From these function definitions, we can construct menus. There are two core menus - the main menu, which appears on this side panel, and also the user menu, which is in this dropdown.
Since we want to modify the sidebar, we want to change the main menu for a signed-in user. Let's replace :dashboard with :reminders:
Also, make sure you rename :dashboard with :reminders in the user menu.
However, this won't work yet as we still need to write a definition function for :reminders. Scroll down the file until you see the get_link/2 function for :dashboard. Let's overwrite this function and replace it with our reminders menu item:
Next, we want this new route to be our kind of "home" route for signed-in users (eg. redirect here after being signed in, or when you click the logo in a layout). To set this, go to helpers.ex and look for the home_path/2 function:
You can see we're looking for :dashboard menu item, which we just replaced. So let's update this to be the new :reminders menu item:
Now refresh the page and we can see the sidebar has updated!
However, it's not highlighted 😤. To highlight it, we need to pass the current_page attribute to the <.layout> component. Open up index.html.heex for reminders and you'll see the <.layout> call up the top.
We need to match this atom to the name field in the menus get_link/2 function. Set it to :reminders both here in index.html.heex and also at the top of show.html.heex.
And now our menu item should be highlighted both on the index page and when you click "Show" for an individual reminder.
We've found that at some point of building a web application you need to implement some kind of logging functionality. You or your client will want to see some stats on how your users are using your web application.
Petal Pro puts logging at the forefront, and encourages you to log as much as you can. By default, it will store logs in your postgres database, but there's no reason why you can't shoot them off to a 3rd party provider.
To showcase Petal Pro logging, we'll create a log every time a user creates a reminder and toggles it complete. If you look in the file log.ex, you will see we have a list of actions that can be logged. Let's add our new log actions:
Now we can do the actual logging. Go to form_component.ex and add a log in the create action.
You will see we're adding some metadata. It is up to you whether or not for new tables like "reminders" you create a migration and add a foreign key to the logs table (log.reminder_id). To keep it simple we can make use of a JSONB column on the logs table called metadata (JSONB is better than a JSON column as it allows for faster searching and even indexing). In this column, we can store any kind of map we want. We'll store the ID and label of the reminder here so we can track it if need be.
Now create a new reminder and we'll check that our logs have been updated. Logs are in the admin section - try clicking the user menu (your avatar up the top right), and select "Admin".
Then click logs on the sidebar menu. Here you should see a new log for creating a reminder.
Let's do another log for when we complete a reminder. We'll need to modify our toggle_reminder function in index.ex.
Now, when we toggle a reminder to "done", a new log will appear.
You might have noticed a toggle for "Live logs" on the logs screen. If you turn this on, you will actually get a live feed of what's happening in your web app. You can try it out by opening two browser windows side by side: one on logs with "Live logs" checked, and one on the reminders screen. If you toggle the reminder on and off, you will see the logs appearing on the admin screen in real-time:
Note that if it isn't working you might have to restart your server.
Next, we need to implement an email reminder that gets sent the day a reminder is overdue. If we head to "Dev", and then click on "Email templates" we can see a list of our transactional emails.
We want to create a new one and show it here so we can visualise it while we develop it. Before we do, let's do a quick overview of how emails work in Petal Pro. Open up email.ex and you will see a list of functions that generate Swoosh email structs. Eg:
If I run this function in IEX I can see the Swoosh struct:
A Swoosh.Email struct can be delivered to an email address by a Swoosh mailer (see mailer.ex). Eg:
So email.ex creates the Swoosh structs and the functions for actually delivering emails like the previous code example are in user_notifier.ex. Think of email.ex functions like view templates, and user_notifer.ex functions like controller actions.
So our steps will be:
Create the function to generate a Swoosh struct in email.ex
Ensure it looks good by creating a new action in email_testing_controller.ex that simply renders the html_body value of the struct
Create a new user_notifier.ex function for use in our application
Create a CRON job that runs once a day that finds overdue reminders and emails the user using the user_notifier.ex function
In email.ex, let's create a function for our new email:
Now it expects a template reminder.html.heex. Let's add one to the /lib/remindly_web/templates/email folder:
Emails are notoriously hard to code and work across the myriad of email providers, so we created a template and included some components to help with the basics like a centered button or gap. See email_components.ex for these.
Now we can try seeing how it looks. Open up email_testing_controller.ex and do two things:
Append "reminder" to the end of @email_templates
Create a new generate_email/2 function for our new email
Now if you refresh the "Email templates" page you can see your new email design:
Note that if you missed it earlier - since emails can be opened in all kinds of email clients, the logo must be hosted online somewhere.
I recommend uploading your logo in png format to some kind of image hosting you like. We personally like Cloudinary so let's chuck our logo up there and then paste the URL into our config file.
Great, now that the email is ready to go we can implement the user_notifier.ex function that accepts a reminder Ecto struct as a parameter and sends the reminder email for us:
Now we can test a sent email in IEX:
Click on "Sent emails" in the sidebar to see that it worked properly. If we cmd-click the button it should take us to the right reminder.
With an email ready to be sent to people who have been lazy, let's create a CRON job to send off the emails. We use Oban for jobs, which supports a CRON schedule (CRON just means a time schedule). Here's what we'll do:
We create a worker Remindly.Workers.ReminderWorker, which has a function perform/1 that will find overdue reminders and send the reminder emails
We tell Oban to run this worker once per day
Petal Pro comes with an example worker you can check out (example_worker.ex). In the same folder, let's create reminder_worker.ex:
And then fill it with this:
Now we have a skeleton worker we can work with. Try testing it out in IEX:
Note you may need to restart your server if you get an error here.
Now we need to find all the overdue reminders. This is a job for the context file reminders.ex. In there we can add the following function:
Normally we'd write a test for this, but for brevity, we'll assume it works correctly (or you can test it in IEX if you like).
Back to the worker, let's finish it off:
We can test it by setting one of our reminders in the past (making sure it's unchecked) and then running the worker in IEX again.
You can double-check by also looking at the "Sent emails" page again.
Now that we know our worker works, we want to schedule it to run every day. This is a simple task thanks to Oban - just modify config.exs:
To keep it simple we'll use the @daily code for scheduling. If you want to fine tune it to the exact minute, you can use the usual CRON syntax (you might need a website to help you generate it).
And that's it! Our job will now run daily.
We have found Fly.io to be the best combination of cheap and easy. Petal Pro has been set up for users to quickly deploy on Fly.io's servers.
If you haven't already, download the Fly.io CLI. Then you will need to register or sign in.
Once signed in, you can create a new project with:
fly launch
We'll call the app remindly.
Hit Y to setting up a DB as we'll need that.
I'll go with the cheapest option for a server - not sure my reminders app will catch on.
When it asks "Do you want to deploy now", hit N - we need to make a change before we deploy.
We need a service to send our emails out. We've found that the simplest and cheapest solution is Amazon SES, and so Petal defaults to using this. We don't really use Amazon for much else, but its email service is cheap and the emails don't get sent to spam as easily as other services we've tried (cough cough Sendgrid).
Setting up Amazon SES is beyond the scope of this tutorial - you can google how to do it. The end result should be you are able to provide the following secrets that we'll provide to our production server:
Finally, we can run fly deploy.
After deploying you can run fly open to see it in your browser. If you've made it this far, congratulations! You've just gone from nothing to production. Obviously, this app needs some touching up, but it gives you an idea of how to do things. We look forward to seeing what people create with Petal Pro.
If you have any feedback, head here to see how to get in touch.
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