IO.gets and running a release in the foreground

Questions / Help
1

Hi,

I made a small game for my sister in law where she has to type the french translation of a random english word. Since she doesn’t have elixir installed on her machine, I thought I could build a release with distillery and embed erts in it.

When I type mix from the root of the project, the game starts, shows a word and wait for an input (with IO.gets). I can then type my translation, press Enter and receive a feedback (success/failure).

When I type iex -S mix, the game starts, shows a word and wait for an input but anything I type doesn’t show up in my terminal. Pressing Enter doesn’t do anything either.

When I build my release and type ./rel/game/bin/game foreground, the game starts, shows a word and wait for an input. I can type an answer and press enter, it shows up in my terminal but nothing happens after I press enter: I can keep typing.

What am I missing? how can I fix it?

2

For the record, someone in the slack chat pointed me to https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery/issues/10

This is not what I attempted to do at first, but that will do for now.

3

Couldn’t you generate an escript? I don’t know out of hand if that works without installing any dependencies at all, but it looks like it should…

4

No, because afaik escript requires elixir or erlang to be installed on the machine.

She’s not a developer herself so I would have to install elixir on her machine which probably also means installing xcode and accepting its license agreement. Not something I want to do.

5

Yeah, that doesn’t seem like a good approach :slight_smile: According to the docs, however, Elixir seems to be embedded by default, unless you opt out of it.