// the find
bitwalker/distillery
Simplify deployments in Elixir with OTP releases!
Distillery was the standard way to build OTP releases for Elixir apps before Mix got native release support in 1.9. It packages a Mix project into a self-contained release with no Erlang/Elixir install required on the target machine. Anyone starting a new project today doesn't need this — Mix releases replaced it — but teams stuck on older codebases predating 1.9 may still have it in their deps.
The extensibility model is genuinely well thought out: config providers, boot hooks, overlays, and release plugins give you real hooks into the release lifecycle instead of a black box. It's pure Elixir with no external dependencies, which made it easy to vendor and reason about. Appup/relup generation for hot code upgrades is something Mix releases still don't fully replicate, so this is the one area where Distillery outlives its replacement.
The README leads with DEPRECATED and says the project is not actively maintained, yet the last push was August 2024 — inconsistent signals about whether it's actually dead or on life support. There's no CI badge or indication tests are still passing against modern Elixir/OTP versions, and the fixture-heavy test suite (compiled .beam files checked into git) looks brittle to maintain. Migrating off it later is extra work you're signing up for now if you adopt it, since the docs themselves point you at Mix releases as the intended successor.