Managoat is the hosted Fountain. Fountain is the open-source engine, and its name is on the CLI, the API, the SDK and this manual. Everything here applies to Managoat unless a page says it is for a self-hosted server.

Local setup

This page bootstraps a fresh machine to run, test and deploy Fountain. The machine can be a laptop, a short-lived VM or a codespace. The work takes about 10 minutes on a fast connection.

What you must install first

Tool	Why	Install
`mise`	Pins Elixir and Erlang to the versions in `.tool-versions`.	`brew install mise` (macOS) or `curl https://mise.run
`gh`	The GitHub CLI, for the clone and for PRs.	`brew install gh && gh auth login`
`psql`	The client for the dev and test databases.	Comes with `brew install postgresql@16`
Docker or native Postgres 14+	Hosts the dev and test database.	`brew install --cask orbstack` or `brew install postgresql@16`

Install mise. Then activate it in your shell.

1. Clone

gh repo clone BinaryBourbon/fountain
cd fountain

2. Install the toolchain

mise install

The command reads .tool-versions and installs the pinned Erlang/OTP and Elixir. .tool-versions pins the local toolchain only. Production runs the release image, which the repo-root Dockerfile builds. That base image pins its own Erlang and Elixir. SETUP.md holds the production parity reference.

Check the result.

elixir --version
# Erlang/OTP 28 ...
# Elixir 1.19.2 (compiled with Erlang/OTP 28)

3. Hex and Rebar, once for each toolchain

mix local.hex --force
mix local.rebar --force

4. Postgres

Option A, Docker. Use this one.

docker compose up -d postgres

The command starts Postgres 16 on localhost:5432. If you already run your own Postgres, set POSTGRES_HOST_PORT in .env to publish somewhere else. docker compose down stops it, and the data stays in the postgres_data volume.

Option B, native Postgres.

psql -h localhost -U "$USER" -d postgres \
  -c "CREATE ROLE postgres WITH LOGIN SUPERUSER PASSWORD 'postgres'"

Each option satisfies the default DATABASE_URL in config/dev.exs and config/test.exs.

5. Dependencies and database

mix deps.get
mix setup                           # dev DB: create + migrate
MIX_ENV=test mix ecto.create
MIX_ENV=test mix ecto.migrate

6. Environment variables

Copy .env.example to .env. Then give each variable a value.

cp .env.example .env

Variable	Purpose
`DATABASE_URL`	The Postgres connection.
`MASTER_SECRETS_KEY`	The platform master key for envelope encryption.
`SPRITES_TOKEN`	The token for the Sprites sandbox platform.
`GITHUB_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID/SECRET`	The GitHub OAuth app.
`STRIPE_*`	The Stripe integration.
`RESEND_API_KEY`	Transactional email.

Make a master key.

openssl rand 32 | base64 | tr '+/' '-_' | tr -d '='

7. Run

mix phx.server   # http://localhost:4000
mix test         # full test suite
mix precommit    # same checks CI runs

If something goes wrong

role "postgres" does not exist. Go back to step 4.
Tests fail with connection pool timeouts. Check that config/test.exs sets pool_size: 20.
mise is slow on the first run. That is normal. It compiles Erlang from source, which takes about 5 minutes. Later runs use the cache.

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