Background

I am creating a simple Phoenix umbrella application to run on a client’s Windows 11 machine and my objective is to have something like an .exe file for running said application.

Code

I am creating the application and releasing it using Elixir’s normal release procedure, using the commands:

mix phx.new demo --umbrella --no-ecto --no-dashboard --no-gettext --no-mailer
cd demo_umbrella
mix deps.get

# set MIX_ENV=prod before doing this last step!
mix release demo

For those of you curious, this is the releases function I am using inside my mix.exs:

  defp releases,
    do: [
      demo: [
        applications: [
          demo_web: :permanent,
          runtime_tools: :permanent
        ],
        include_executables_for: [:windows]
      ]
    ]

Now, this basic setup will create a .bat file: _build\prod\rel\demo\bin\demo.bat that I can start and stop via the following commands: _build\prod\rel\demo\bin\demo {start | stop}.

Problems & Research

Users that know programming can simply open a terminal in Windows, type _build\prod\rel\demo\bin\demo start and the application will launch (accessible via localhost:4000).

But users normally don’t have such knowledge. So I want something as close to an .exe file as possible.

I have tried using Bakeware:

• * (ArgumentError) unknown application: :bakeware · Issue #136 · bake-bake-bake/bakeware · GitHub

And its spiritual successor, Burrito:

• Does not create release for Windows-11 · Issue #111 · burrito-elixir/burrito · GitHub

Unfortunately, both fail to work for Windows 11. This leads me to try the shortcut approach.
Here I create Windows shortcut to demo.bat and I specify in the target path the commands:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1169556/making-a-windows-shortcut-start-relative-to-where-the-folder-is

Which in this case will be %windir%\system32\cmd.exe /c start "" "%CD%\demo.bat" start

Now, all is fine and dandy, but there is a problem:

1. the console always appears.

Questions

So this leaves me to the following questions:

1. How do I prevent the console from showing?
2. Does demo.bat include the erlang VM and the elixir version needed to run the application? Or do I need to have those installed in the client’s machine ?
3. I am under the impression that Elixir releases are supposed to include everything needed (https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/config-and-releases.html):

A release is a self-contained directory that consists of your application code, all of its dependencies, plus the whole Erlang Virtual Machine (VM) and runtime. Once a release is assembled, it can be packaged and deployed to a target as long as the target runs on the same operating system (OS) distribution and version as the machine that assembled the release.

, but in case this bat file does not include everything, how do I fix this?