Getting Started

Please take the time to review the output of mix help release, as well as other release.* tasks, they cover more detail about usage at the command line, and what the various options mean.

Additionally, if you want to know what a certain configuration option does, you can find that information on the Configuration page.

Installation/Setup

Simply add distillery to your dependencies, run mix deps.get and you are ready to start.

Within your project directory, you can then run mix release.init to setup your project with a rel directory containing a release configuration file (config.exs). Take a look at the output of mix help release.init to see how you can tweak this initial config file.

Overview

To understand what various terms mean in the context of releases, please review the Terminology.

There are two basic cases when building a release:

• Building a new release
• Building a release which upgrades a previously installed release

There is a great deal of granularity around how releases are defined, how to handle upgrades, and so on, but that’s the basic gist. Distillery provides a single command for both, but a flag to explicitly enable the latter case, in other words:

# Build a release
> mix release

# Build an upgrade release
> mix release --upgrade

From time to time, you may want to clean a previous release build, which you can do with mix release.clean.

If you want to remove all traces of distillery from your project, simply run mix release.clean --implode, and remove it from your dependencies.

For more detail on building a release for a project, please see the Walkthrough doc. There is more detailed information on more advanced topics such as upgrades in other documents hosted here as well.