Using Distillery

Questions / Help
1

Hello all, I’m in the situation where I have to take my Phoenix app and generate a release that contains the app + a github private repository.
After asking for suggestions on Slack, I discovered distillery and I’m attempting to build my first release.
After installing it as a dependency I succeeded at generating a release, but when I try to start the app it crashes, and I have no idea what are the next steps I can do to debug it: the erl_crash.dump leaves me completely clueless

What I did is just “mix release” + “_build/dev/rel/owl/bin/owl console”, same computer, that’s it.
“mix phoenix.server” runs just fine.

2

Are there any logs? You may find them at _build/dev/rel/owl/var/log. They would probably be a bit more helpful than the erl_crash.dump.

3

Well not really, at least for me…

4

mix release is probably missing the enviroment setting.

MIX_ENV=prod mix release --env=prod might help

5

Are there any errors printed when you execute _build/dev/rel/owl/bin/owl console?

6

Distillery is using dev environment by default so that shouldn’t be an issue.

7

Try adding :mix to the list of applications in your mixfile. See https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery/issues/25 for more.

8

@idi527
You should not add Mix to the list of your runtime applications. A lot of functions from Mix need a Mixfile (mix.exs) to be present in a directory. Many of them would probably crash when calling them in a release.

@ngw
The problem you are facing may be related to the fact that you are compiling your project and generating a release in dev environment. IIRC Phoenix project template enables live reloading by default in dev environment and your crash log confirms that. Try generating a release in a prod environment, something like:

MIX_ENV=prod mix release [any other options you pass to distillery]

Your app crashes because your endpoint tries to enable live reloading (because it was compiled in dev), and :phoenix_live_reload is not present in a :application list (and it should not be, because it relies on Mix :slight_smile: ).

Let me know if that works for you :slight_smile:

2 Likes
9

I faced this problem before.
What @jur0 sugggests will fix this problem.
And you must set the option to start the phoenix server also when the release application start.

Dev.

10

Just to be more “official” about this: the problem is that the code reloader is enabled in the environment you are building the release in. You can’t use the code reloader in a release because it relies on Mix, and you can’t bundle Mix in a release because it’s not intended for use outside of a standard MIx project structure. While you can bundle Mix into a release, doing so is unlikely to work for the vast majority of things you’ll want it for, so it’s better to assume you just can’t at all.

1 Like