Can elixir or erlang programs be compiled to a sta

Question

It sees that elixir has a tool called elixirc and erlang has a tool called erlc to compile modules for use. It says immediately after this that you can then run code with the elixir command line tool.

Is there a way to compile a binary executable with elixir or erlang? (one which I can chmod +x binary_name and then run from the same directory with ./binary_name)

Answer 1

Escripts support that to some extent but you still need Erlang installed in your machine. See this answer for more information: Elixir or Hex portable package format?

Answer 2

You can use tools like rebar to generate a release that also contains the erts, which makes it possible to run said release on a machine where erlang is not installed. But the erts included corresponds to the operating system on which the release was built, i.e. windows binaries if built on windows.

Answer 3

Make sure you checkout Distillery https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery It does what you need, without having to deal with Rebar.

Add this to your mix.exs file's dependencies then run mix release. defp deps do [{:distillery, "~> 0.9"}] end

Their documentation is great. https://hexdocs.pm/distillery/home.html