Improving my gitlab-ci/distillery deployment

I managed to get a working Gitlab CI setup with a test runner, distillery releases and rsync deployment but I feel there is a lot of room for improvement. This is my config.

I am looking for a better way to send the tarball to my server and start it. My deployment stage feels kinda hacky

deploy:
  image: alpine:3.5
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - apk add --no-cache sshpass rsync openssh
    - sshpass -e rsync -EzavP -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no" build.tar.gz root@${SERVER}:/root
    - sshpass -e ssh root@${SERVER} -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no "_build/prod/rel/my_app/bin/my_app stop ; rm -rf _build ; tar -xzf build.tar.gz ; _build/prod/rel/my_app/bin/my_app start"

Gitlab aparently does not offer a very clean way to manage ssh keys so I skipped the key check .
I also need a better way to start the new build on the server, right now I’m just stopping and deleting the old one causing a hiccup in my app .

I run the migrations on every app startup via distillery hook (source).

#!/bin/sh

# pinging the app and waiting until it's up would probably be nicer
# this file was copied 
sleep 3 

echo "Running migrations"
bin/my_app rpc Elixir.MyApp.Migration migrate

Sure it doesn’t feel ideal, but its very cool to see the pipeline running on gitlab and a few minutes later refreshing the browser to see my app running on linode