I totally agree with you about tooling being the major hurdle, and I would like to also note your particular case: deploying Elixir/Erlang the first-time is a real motherfucker.

I've deployed (server-side) code in Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, .NET, JavaScript, and probably a couple others I forgot about... but among all of those Erlang/Elixir was by far the most difficult first-time deploy (as an OTP application). It has gotten infinitely better, but probably only for those of us who have been doing it for a while (6+ years doing Elixir professionally for me). For your particular case, let me see if I can help you out ('cuz I've definitely been there).

It now mostly boils down to, use mix release:

https://hexdocs.pm/mix/1.12/Mix.Tasks.Release.html#module-te...

with the "secret sauce" being to setup a build server where you will build the production release. You'll want the same flavor/version of Linux you plan on deploying to, and then copy the build artifact (tarball) from your build server to your application server (or somewhere else in-between).

One other thing to note, there's a good chance (because everyone does this) that you'll have some broken environment variables, or module attributes, because you thought they were set at runtime but they are in-fact set at compile time.

Maybe I should write that blog you're looking for...