I asked that question on the mailing list and the short answer is, basically the same way you do with Distillery. Release tasks in Distillery are just custom commands, and what the guide for migrations does is a custom command that evals a function. You can do that in 1.9 releases as well. So it’s the exact same thing, except instead of

app/bin/hello migrate

you run

app/bin/hello eval "Hello.ReleaseTasks.migrate"

We are also adding new functions to Ecto.SQL to abstract the bureaucracy of starting new applications and repositories to run migrations in releases: Add Ecto.Migrator.with_repo/2 to start/stop apps for migrations by josevalim · Pull Request #113 · elixir-ecto/ecto_sql · GitHub

This code was already inside of Ecto.SQL, we are just making it public.