Endpoint

Phoenix applications start the HelloWeb.Endpoint as a supervised process. By default, the Endpoint is added to the supervision tree in lib/hello/application.ex as a supervised process. Each request begins and ends its lifecycle inside your application in an endpoint. The endpoint handles starting the web server and transforming requests through several defined plugs before calling the Router.

defmodule Hello.Application do
  use Application
  def start(_type, _args) do
    #...

    children = [
      supervisor(HelloWeb.Endpoint, []),
    ]

    opts = [strategy: :one_for_one, name: Hello.Supervisor]
    Supervisor.start_link(children, opts)
  end
end

Endpoint Contents

Endpoints gather together common functionality and serve as entrance and exit for all of the HTTP requests to your application. The endpoint holds plugs that are common to all requests coming into your application.

Let’s take a look at the endpoint for the application Hello generated in the Up and Running page.

defmodule HelloWeb.Endpoint do
  ...
end

The first call inside of our Endpoint module is the use Phoenix.Endpoint macro with the otp_app. The otp_app is used for the configuration. This defines several functions on the HelloWeb.Endpoint module, including the start_link function which is called in the supervision tree.

  use Phoenix.Endpoint, otp_app: :hello

Next the endpoint declares a socket on the “/socket” URI. “/socket” requests will be handled by the HelloWeb.UserSocket module which is declared elsewhere in our application. Here we are just declaring that such a connection will exist.

  socket "/socket", HelloWeb.UserSocket

Next comes a series of plugs that are relevant to all requests in our application. We can customize some of the features, for example, enabling gzip: true when deploying to production to gzip the static files.

Static files are served from priv/static before any part of our request makes it to a router.

  plug Plug.Static,
    at: "/", from: :hello, gzip: false,
    only: ~w(css fonts images js favicon.ico robots.txt)

If code reloading is enabled, a socket will be used to communicate to the browser that the page needs to be reloaded when code is changed on the server. This feature is enabled by default in the development environment. This is configured using config :hello, HelloWeb.Endpoint, code_reloader: true.

  if code_reloading? do
    socket "/phoenix/live_reload/socket", Phoenix.LiveReloader.Socket
    plug Phoenix.LiveReloader
    plug Phoenix.CodeReloader
  end

Plug.Logger logs the request path, status code and request time by default.

  plug Plug.Logger

Plug.Session handles the session cookies and session stores.

  plug Plug.Session,
    store: :cookie,
    key: "_hello_key",
    signing_salt: "change_me"

By default the last plug in the endpoint is the router. The router matches a path to a particular controller action or plug. The router is covered in the Routing Guide.

  plug HelloWeb.Router

The endpoint can be customized to add additional plugs, to allow HTTP basic authentication, CORS, subdomain routing and more.

The final thing generated in the endpoint by default is the init function. This callback is used for dynamic configuration. The specifics of the dynamic configuration are covered in the Phoenix.Endpoint module documentation.

def init(_key, config) do
  if config[:load_from_system_env] do
    port = System.get_env("PORT") || raise "expected the PORT environment variable to be set"
    {:ok, Keyword.put(config, :http, [:inet6, port: port])}
  else
    {:ok, config}
  end
end

Faults in the different parts of the supervision tree, such as the Ecto Repo, will not immediately impact the main application. The supervisor is therefore able to restart those processes separately after unexpected faults. It is also possible for an application to have multiple endpoints, each with its own supervision tree.

There are many functions defined in the endpoint module for path helpers, channel subscriptions and broadcasts, instrumentation, and endpoint configuration. These are all covered in the Endpoint API docs for Phoenix.Endpoint.

Using SSL

To prepare an application to serve requests over SSL, we need to add a little bit of configuration and two environment variables. In order for SSL to actually work, we’ll need a key file and certificate file from a certificate authority. The environment variables that we’ll need are paths to those two files.

The configuration consists of a new https: key for our endpoint whose value is a keyword list of port, path to the key file, and path to the cert (pem) file. If we add the otp_app: key whose value is the name of our application, Plug will begin to look for them at the root of our application. We can then put those files in our priv directory and set the paths to priv/our_keyfile.key and priv/our_cert.crt.

Here’s an example configuration from config/prod.exs.

use Mix.Config

. . .
config :hello, HelloWeb.Endpoint,
  http: [port: {:system, "PORT"}],
  url: [host: "example.com"],
  cache_static_manifest: "priv/static/cache_manifest.json",
  https: [port: 443,
          otp_app: :hello,
          keyfile: System.get_env("SOME_APP_SSL_KEY_PATH"),
          certfile: System.get_env("SOME_APP_SSL_CERT_PATH"),
          cacertfile: System.get_env("INTERMEDIATE_CERTFILE_PATH") # OPTIONAL Key for intermediate certificates
          ]

Without the otp_app: key, we need to provide absolute paths to the files wherever they are on the filesystem in order for Plug to find them.

Path.expand("../../../some/path/to/ssl/key.pem", __DIR__)

Force SSL

In many cases, you’ll want to force all incoming requests to use SSL by redirecting HTTP to HTTPS. This can be accomplished by setting the :force_ssl option in your endpoint configuration. It expects a list of options which are forwarded to Plug.SSL. By default it sets the “strict-transport-security” header in HTTPS requests, forcing browsers to always use HTTPS. If an unsafe (HTTP) request is sent, it redirects to the HTTPS version using the :host specified in the :url configuration. For example:

config :my_app, MyApp.Endpoint,
  force_ssl: [rewrite_on: [:x_forwarded_proto]]

To dynamically redirect to the host of the current request, set :host in the :force_ssl configuration to nil.

config :my_app, MyApp.Endpoint,
  force_ssl: [rewrite_on: [:x_forwarded_proto], host: nil]

Releasing with Exrm

In order to build and run a release with Exrm, make sure you also include the :ssl app in mix.exs:

def application do
  [mod: {MyApp, []},
   applications: [:phoenix, :phoenix_html, :cowboy, :logger, :gettext,
                  :phoenix_ecto, :postgrex, :ssl]]
end

Or else you might run into errors:

** (MatchError) no match of right hand side value: {:error, {:ssl, {'no such file or directory', 'ssl.app'}}}