# Programming Elixir 1.6 - Distillery-The Elixir Release Manager chapter commands for Elixir 1.9/Distillery 2.1 **URL:** \ **Category:** PragProg Customers\ **Tags:** book-programming-elixir-1-6\ **Created:** [31 July 2020 14:25 UTC](https://forum.devtalk.com/t/programming-elixir-1-6-distillery-the-elixir-release-manager-chapter-commands-for-elixir-1-9-distillery-2-1/1196 "2020-07-31T14:25:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![veimis](https://forum.devtalk.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/b38774/32.png) [@veimis](https://forum.devtalk.com/u/veimis)\ **Post date:** [31 July 2020 14:25 UTC](https://forum.devtalk.com/t/programming-elixir-1-6-distillery-the-elixir-release-manager-chapter-commands-for-elixir-1-9-distillery-2-1/1196/1 "2020-07-31T14:25:58Z")
I hope this will prove useful for other readers of the book. I was working through chapter 20 OTP: Applications and run to issues with the example for creating a release using Distillery. The command _mix release --env=prod_ failed with an error like > \*\* (Mix) Could not invoke task “release”: 1 error found! > –env : Unknown option Since Elixir 1.9 brings releases directly into Elixir, the _mix release_ -command previously used with distillery now overlaps with the Elixir release command. Distillery version 2.1 works with Elixir 1.9 and updates the distillery release command to _mix distillery.release_. > **[Elixir v1.9 released](https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2019/06/24/elixir-v1-9-0-released/)** > > Elixir v1.9 is out with releases support, improved configuration and more. I made the following changes to be able to locally follow the distillery release example in the book. Elixir and OTP versions used: > $ elixir --version > Erlang/OTP 23 [erts-11.0.2] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [ds:4:4:10] [async-threads:1] [hipe] > > Elixir 1.10.4 (compiled with Erlang/OTP 22) I don’t have relevant pages as my kindle only shows “locations”, but I have included the section topics. Section _“Your First Release”_ 1 Change dependency to distillery 2.1 in **mix.exs** ❌ _{:distillery, “~\> 1.5”, runtime: false}_ ✅ _{:distillery, “~\> 2.1”, runtime: false}_ 2 Use the updated command for initializing the release ❌ _mix release.init_ ✅ _mix distillery.init_ 3 Create the first release (0.0.1) ❌ _mix release --env=prod_ ✅ _MIX\_ENV=prod mix distillery.release --env=prod_ This first failed for me (after following the book example) with > Release failed: could not load /path/config/config.exs I got around it by adding a minimal config.exs file _mkdir config && echo “import Config” \> config/config.exs_ Side note: In the book the deploy commands are run with ssh. I tried, instead, to run the deploy commands directly from the _\_build -directory_ and found out that consecutive releases don’t work properly that way. > “I only just noticed that the original issue confirms that this issue was occurring because of running from \_build.” > [Successive hot upgrade releases produce error · Issue #160 · bitwalker/distillery · GitHub](https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery/issues/160#issuecomment-279163140) This might be documented on the distillery documentation, but I haven’t made it there yet. Section _“A Second Release”_ 4 Create the first upgrade release (0.2.0) ❌ _mix release --env=prod --upgrade_ ✅ _MIX\_ENV=prod mix distillery.release --env=prod --upgrade_ 5 Upgrade running code This might be because I didn’t use ssh, but instead just copied the archives to separate directory, but the command _deploy/bin/sequence upgrade 0.2.0_ failed with > Node user@host is not running! To successfully run the upgrade I changed the following: Update node name, -name argument, in **rel/vm.args** with the right node name. You can check the node name in the iex console with _Node.self_ command. Not sure if relevant, but I updated the _set cookie_ option (environment :prod) in **rel/config.exs** with the value in **~/.erlang.cookie** Section _“Migrating Server State”_ 6. Create the second release ❌ _mix release --env=prod --upgrade_ ✅ _MIX\_ENV=prod mix distillery.release --env=prod --upgrade_ That did it for me 😌