Can Elixir or Erlang programs be compiled to a standalone binary?

Question

It says 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

Make sure you checkout 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:

• Home - Distillery Documentation

Answer 3

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, ie windows binaries if built on windows.

Answer 4

You can use Elixir's built-in releases as of Elixir 1.9. It is a lightweight alternative to Distillery .

Caveats: It will not create anything remotely like Go does with a single binary executable that you can run almost anywhere. Also your target will have to match the CPU architecture and OS.

To build a release run:

mix release

Read more here: https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Release.html

Answer 5

There are a few tools now that allow you to create a self contained executable binary that doesn't require any dependencies on the target machine. They support multiple platforms.

Bakeware: https://github.com/bake-bake-bake/bakeware

Burrito: https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito