What are best practices for making Erlang releases?

Question

I've been checking out Faxien+Sinan and Rebar, and the basic philosophy of Erlang OTP seems to be, install applications and releases on a single Erlang image instance. What are the best practices for keeping releases self contained? Is there a way to package releases such that you don't have to modify the site for machines that you're deploying to? How about gathering all dependencies into the codebase for management?

Perhaps I'm going against the grain... I come from a Java background and the philosophy of "nothing pre-installed but the JVM" seems very different.

Answer 1

IMHO this can't be answered in a few sentences. You should have to read some parts of the included documentation, especially "Erlang/OTP System Documentation" (otp-system-documentation-X.Y.Z.pdf, with X.Y.Z being the version number), or have a look at the book "Erlang and OTP in Action" because throughout this book there is "one" example of a "service" with different "parts" from the first steps, using Erlang/OTP concepts and finally building a "release".

IMHO this is currently the best book around, because it not only introduces Erlang, but also shows what OTP is and how OTP is used for a project. And it is not just a collection of loose samples, but everything is build around a single project.