It's worth noting that distillery is deprecated in favor of mix releases, which don't support relups out of the box, and specifically warn against them due to the complexity involved in writing code to support them correctly.
It's a cool feature that's no doubt amazing for applications that need it, but it brings a fair amount of complexity vs other deployment strategies.
> I’ve spent some time understanding how to do hot code reloading with releases built using mix release, and here I’d like to detail the steps needed, in hopes that it will help someone.
Yeah, note that this article is from 2016. I distinctly remember during that time that these hot-swap deployments were all the rage in the Elixir community, and then fell out of fashion with time.
It's a cool feature that's no doubt amazing for applications that need it, but it brings a fair amount of complexity vs other deployment strategies.