Adopting Elixir for Software Engineering Leads & Managers/

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Using Distillery

Using Distillery

Learn and practice distillery in this lesson.

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What is Distillery?

We’re going to use a release tool called Distillery. From the readme file:

“Distillery takes your Mix project and produces an Erlang/OTP release, a distilled form of your raw application’s components; a single package which can be deployed anywhere, independently of an Erlang/Elixir installation. No dependencies, no hassle.”

A sample project

Let’s walk through building a release for a new project using Distillery.

First, start with mix to set up a new project:

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mix new sample

Then, add :distillery under your dependencies in the mix.exs file like this:

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 def deps do
  [
    {:distillery, "~> 2.1"}
  ]
end

Don’t worry, we have already made a project for you and added the dependency as well.

Let’s see how Distillery works. Please follow the steps written below to run the program.

defmodule Sample.MixProject do
  use Mix.Project

  def project do
    [
      app: :sample,
      version: "0.1.0",
      elixir: "~> 1.12",
      start_permanent: Mix.env() == :prod,
      deps: deps()
    ]
  end

  # Run "mix help compile.app" to learn about applications.
  def application do
    [
      extra_applications: [:logger]
    ]
  end

  # Run "mix help deps" to learn about dependencies.
  defp deps do
    [
      {:distillery, "~> 2.1"}
      # {:dep_from_hexpm, "~> 0.3.0"},
      # {:dep_from_git, git: "https://github.com/elixir-lang/my_dep.git", tag: "0.1.0"}
    ]
  end
end
Running the distillery

Similar to Mix, releases have different environments.

  • For :dev, Distillery sets dev_mode to true, which supports code reloading for Phoenix and Nerves applications, and sets include_erts
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