Elixir v1.9.0-rc.0 released

[josevalim]

Regarding documentation, those concerns aren’t solved right now (it is too soon) but I believe it will be solved in the short term as, by being part of core, more people will use it, battle test it, document it, write guides, etc. For example, [latest Ecto ships with functions(Add Ecto.Migrator.with_repo/2 to start/stop apps for migrations by josevalim · Pull Request #113 · elixir-ecto/ecto_sql · GitHub) that make running Ecto tasks inside a release very straightforward]. Phoenix guides will also be updated to cover it.

In particular:

@jswny

Having to go through the Distillery docs in order to deploy a Phoenix application (they were pretty good but lacking in some areas and had bugs in others). There was also a general lack of guidance on how to do more advanced things.

Phoenix will ship with guides for this (it also does for distillery though).

@jswny

Having to figure out how to use environment variables for configuration at runtime in a release or figure out how to properly set the configuration with environment variables when building a release.

There is a well-documented path for this in Elixir releases (TL;DR - there is a config/releases.exs that runs on release boot).

@jswny

Having to create special code and special release tasks just to run migrations when those could already be run from the command line with mix. This included having to setup shell scripts.

Custom code is still necessary for Elixir but you don’t need shell scripts. Only a module with functions you will invoke. See the Ecto link above and the official guides. The Hex migration (which is a Phoenix app) covered this too: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2019/05/updating-hex-pm-to-use-elixir-releases/

@jswny

Figuring out how to load the secret key from an environment variable at runtime.

Same as above other environments variables: just put it in config/releases.exs. In fact, for Phoenix v1.4 projects, getting it to work is a matter of renaming config/prod.secret.exs to config/releases.exs.

[jswny]

Thanks for the quick response! This makes me feel much more comfortable with the new process. I think in particular the runtime release configuration support will be a huge improvement and will alleviate a big reason why releases were confusing in the past.

I think I remember that it is a future goal to unify the experience of using mix and releases so that there isn’t the “I did this easily in mix why is it so different in a release” reaction. That, in my opinion, will mark the resolution of the final difficulty with deployment for Elixir apps now that runtime configuration has been improved and release generation brought to core.

Cheers to a bright future