Umbrella Projects

Historically, exrm had poor support for umbrella projects. It worked by building a release of each application individually, which in some cases was a fit, and in others, was not at all the desired result. Distillery has been written with both standard and umbrella projects in mind, and particularly with the goal of flexible handling of umbrella projects.

If you run mix release.init in a umbrella project, it will template out a configuration file which bundles all of the applications in the umbrella under a single release. If you would prefer exrm’s behaviour of a release per application in the umbrella, run mix release.init --release-per-app.

You may also define whatever combination of apps to releases you wish. Let’s say you have an umbrella with apps lib_a, lib_b app_c, app_d, and app_e, you could define any combination of app_c, app_d, and app_e you want, and their dependencies to lib_a and lib_b will be automatically resolved to pull them in as needed. For instance, maybe you want to release app_c and app_d together, but release app_e separately - this would look like the following in rel/config.exs:

release :app_c_and_d do
  set version: "0.1.0"
  set applications: [:app_c, :app_d]
end

release :app_e do
  set version: current_version(:app_e)
end

As you can see, you have a lot of flexibility in how you handle releases with umbrella projects!