If you run mix in production, then it's just like running Rails or Node. You don't get certain features like hot upgrades in production while keeping what's in memory on the server, but you don't get that from Rails/Node/PHP/Python either.

If you want those BEAM releases, then you have to use the Elixir (or Erlang) tools for them. I also encountered a great deal of frustration when working from a different OS, but no more than I did when building Rails apps several years ago.

Now I generally, build with Gitlab CI/CD and deploy from that Gitlab container to my server with Distillery and Edeliver. It lets me use the standard CI/CD tools and have stateful upgrades. I am running Ubuntu on the server, though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mm44ADU3kc

Sure, 2 days of work the first time, which is a negligible amount of time for any real world project (otherwise you are on the wrong language). This if you want a good pipeline. Otherwise it's a couple of hours, but even with rails i always invested a couple of days to have a good pipeline.

Doesn't mean rust does not do it better, but it's really not the point for choosing a language over another. In a big project you have a dedicated person. In a medium project, the investment is very small. In a small project, you are better served by prototyping tools (rails)

If deployment was easier in the Elixir world, would you have stuck with it?

The master version of Elixir also has support for releases https://hexdocs.pm/mix/master/Mix.Tasks.Release.html

There are mostly two ways to deploy Elixir. One is the provisioned approach: you install Erlang/Elixir (or you assume it is installed in the machine), then you fetch your project source code, fetch deps, compile them and run your project (in the same way you would run it locally).

The other approach is via releases. A release is a way to package the Erlang VM, Elixir and all of your application code into something you can dropped into production. The downside is that you need to match the target OS and architecture but there are many documented approaches to do so. Today the main tool for performing releases is Distillery and it has great documentation covering AWS, Docker, etc: https://hexdocs.pm/distillery/home.html

In Elixir v1.9, coming out this July, we are incorporating releases as part of the language. You can read more about it in our documentation for master: https://hexdocs.pm/mix/master/Mix.Tasks.Release.html

If you are using a PaaS such as Heroku, it is likely there is already tooling that will take care of it for you, such as the Heroku Elixir buildpack: https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir. There is also Gigalixir, a PaaS specific to Erlang/Elixir: https://gigalixir.com/

Finally, if you want a more structured resource, there is also the Adopting Elixir book (disclaimer! I am one of the authors): https://pragprog.com/book/tvmelixir/adopting-elixir - One third of the book is about production concerns, covering deployment, performance, metrics, monitoring, etc.

If none of this works, you can always reach out to the community in elixirforum.com. I assure you there are more than 2 developers that know about deployment :) and if you still feel like none of the replies about deployment there have been satisfactory, feel free to add me to the conversation there.

> And you're definitely not going to write CLI tools in Elixir (it straight doesn't work with escript in the first place).

I do not understand this comment as Elixir works with escripts just fine. You can build an escript for your project by simply calling `mix escript.build`. This has been available since v1.0 (https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.0.0/lib/mix/li...). You can even install escripts directly from Hex (our package manager) since Elixir v1.4 (2.5 years old).