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elixirdistillery

Should I include mix app in extra_applications?

I'm using distillery to package an elixir application, and I want to have access to the current environment in the runtime (is it :dev, :test or :prod).

The goal will be checking the env at the runtime, something like this:

if Mix.env() == :prod do
  # do this only in production
end

What are the drawbacks of including the mix app in the release?

def application do
    [mod: {EvercamMedia, []}, extra_applications: [:runtime_tools, :os_mon, :recon, :mix]]
end
Solution

  • Using mix to detect the production environment is clearly an antipattern. Instead, one should probably start the release as

    MY_APP_PROD=true release start

    and use the system environment check as shown below

    if System.get_env("MY_APP_PROD") == "true" do
  ...
end