Copying files to target system as part of release process

Questions / Help
1

Hi folks. I’m moving one of my apps from Distillery to mix releases. One thing I’m not sure about, is there a “recommended” way to copy files to target (the web server), I’m talking about files that belong outside the Elixir release where the priv is not appropriate. Specifically, I have a SystemD unit/system file (/lib/systemd/system/my_app.service) I want to write to the Linux target system. In Distillery I had something like this:

set overlays: [
    {:template, "rel/etc/my_app.service", "etc/my_app.service"},
]

I was putting the unit file inside the release directory and then simlinking to it in a separate step. I guess I could put the unit file in priv then simlink to it.

Really appreciate any suggestions on this one.

Thanks!

2

It looks like the latest Elixir v1.10-rc adds support for overlays which was just committed a few days ago: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/commit/a54e90147996f402777ef740b31b83e12257a218

Otherwise you could use a tool such as ansible to automate copying arbitrary files/templates to the server along with the .tgz release file.

3

Oh nice, that’s great! I will see about going to 1.10. Reading the docs for that commit gave me another idea: It looks like in 1.9 the “recommended” way would be in the :steps of the release configuration as shown here: https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Release.html#module-steps.

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