A proof of concept of an Elixir/Phoenix node that runs PostgreSQL Replication to automatically synchronize data to clients, showcased at my ElixirConf US 2024 keynote.

Beware: messy code ahead! You will find plenty of TODOs, missing abstractions, and non-optimal decisions. Our goal is only to show how to use channels, transaction snapshots, and PostgreSQL replication to synchronize data with the front-end in a way that preserves transactional consistency. See priv/repo/migrations for the required SQL instructions and lib/sync/replication.ex for the replication logic.

See the Design.md document for an extensive discussion on the design, possible optimizations, and trade-offs one might consider when implementing this. The slides are also available.

This project builds on top of PostgreSQL replication and it requires PostgreSQL 14+. You must also enable replication in your PostgreSQL instance:

ALTER SYSTEM SET wal_level='logical';
ALTER SYSTEM SET max_wal_senders='64';
ALTER SYSTEM SET max_replication_slots='64';

Then you must restart your database.

You can also set those values when starting "postgres". This is useful, for example, when running it from Docker:

services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres:14
    env:
      ...
    command: ["postgres", "-c", "wal_level=logical"]

For CI, GitHub Actions do not support setting command, so you can update and restart Postgres instead in a step:

- name: "Set PG settings"
  run: |
    docker exec ${{ job.services.postgres.id }} sh -c 'echo "wal_level=logical" >> /var/lib/postgresql/data/postgresql.conf'
    docker restart ${{ job.services.pg.id }}

In production, max_wal_senders and max_replication_slots must be set roughly to twice the number of machines you are using in production (to encompass blue-green/canary deployments). 64 is a reasonable number for the huge majority of applications out there.

To start your Phoenix server:

• Run mix setup to install and setup dependencies
• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server or inside IEx with iex -S mix phx.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.

Anthony Accomazzo for insights, review of design documents, and code reviews. Chris McCord for feedback, code reviews, and writing all of my JavaScript. Steffen Deusch for feedback and code reviews.

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