building ktistec is still an endeavor—both in time and in space. i have work ahead of me to reduce the build footprint—since starting this project, i've learned that some combinations of the crystal language features i used to recreate rails magic (macros, named arguments and inheritance) are hard on the compiler.

in any case, having exceeded the capacity of the tiny linux vps that hosts epiktistes, i set out to build a statically linked executable on my laptop (macos mojave) that i could deploy to my vps (linux centos).

the official instructions, using docker and alpine linux, are here. to get it to build, i had to install the static libraries for sqlite, and to get it to run on my vps i had to specify the location of the openssl cert file, which is loaded at runtime and doesn't match the location in alpine linux.

tl;dr the steps

• build (i haven't automated any of this yet)
  1. docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/workspace -w /workspace crystallang/crystal:latest-alpine sh
  2. apk update && apk upgrade
  3. apk add sqlite-static
  4. crystal build src/ktistec/server.cr --static
  5. exit
• run (after copying the executable to the vps)
  • SSL_CERT_FILE=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt ./server

#ktistec #crystal