Can you deploy an Elixir site as easily as a PHP one?

AstonJ · December 22, 2016, 3:19pm

Great post @Qqwy, I wonder if we could add some of it under a ‘Overview’ heading at the top of our deployment wiki?

Particularly some of this:

Use git or another revision control system so you keep track of older versions of your code (so if something is wrong, you can easily go back to a previous, working version). Many other tools ‘build on top of’ git to do their stuff in a nicer way.

Build an escript, which means that your source code is bundled in one file that can run on any system that has the same Erlang version installed, which you can easily upload (using either FTP or other, more flexible and secure ways such as SCP)

Build an OTP release, which means that your source code is bundled in one file that is not dependent on other installed tools, which you can easily upload (just like above). Many other tools ‘build on top of’ releases to do their stuff in a nicer way. There are tools known as build systems that make this easier:

Distillery

exrm

relx

There are tools that will automate the building and uploading of an OTP release to your server for you (archieving both of above two points), such as:

edeliver

Gatling
Interestingly, these tools also have support for hot code reloading, which is overkill for most applications, but it means that your application will keep on running while the new code is being loaded (so there is no downtime at all).

Here’s the wiki:

I think your post gives a great overview of how the two options differ