Building Releases with Mix Release

When you develop an Elixir application, you often run it with mix run --no-halt. This is great for development, but not ideal for production.

For deployment, we need a self-contained package that can run independently, without needing the Mix build tool or even Elixir's source code on the target machine. This is where releases come in!

Running an application with mix run has a few drawbacks for production:

• It requires the full Mix build tool and your project's source code.
• It uses the development environment configuration by default.
• Startup can be slower as it needs to compile and load dependencies.
• It lacks proper daemonization features for background processes.