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Command line interface¶

Distillery is a command-line oriented tool, and has two primary modes of interaction. First, via Mix tasks, when working within a Mix project. Secondly, via shell scripts, which are part of the generated release, and are the primary means by which you interact with that release.

Mix tasks¶

Distillery provides the following Mix tasks:

distillery.init - for initializing Distillery within a new project
distillery.release - for building releases
distillery.release.clean - for cleaning up generated release artifacts
distillery.gen.appup - for generating appups to use in upgrade releases

For more information about these commands and their usage:

1	$ mix help <task>

Tip

If you are building releases as part of your CI/CD pipeline, you may want to use the --warnings-as-errors flag to the release task. This will prevent building releases which may fail at runtime from making it through the pipeline. NOTE: this --warnings-as-errors is not the same as the compile task --warnings-as-errors, if you want both, you should run compile first, then run distillery.release, passing the flag to both.

Release tasks¶

Release tasks are commands given to the shell script which acts as the release entry point, i.e. the bin/myapp script.

There are numerous tasks available, you have already seen a few of them:

foreground - run the release in the foreground, like mix run --no-halt
console - run the release with a shell attached, like iex -S mix
start - run the release in the background

There are a few other important tasks:

stop - stop a release started via start
remote_console - attach a shell to a running release
describe - print metadata about the release

To see a full listing of tasks available, run bin/myapp with no arguments.