Once you’re ready to deploy your Elixir application to multiple servers, you’ll want to take advantage of the distributed features that the runtime offers. For example, if you are using Phoenix channels, you’ll want broadcasts to be sent across the cluster. You can setup your deployment as a cluster in a few simple steps:

Start by creating a new sys.config file in your project. We’ll conventionally use the name sys.config because Erlang assumes exactly one system configuration file is used when building releases, with this name. Add the following contents the new file:

[{kernel, [ {sync_nodes_optional, ['n1@127.0.0.1', 'n2@127.0.0.1']}, {sync_nodes_timeout, 10000} ]} ].

In this example, we have two nodes in the cluster, n1@127.0.0.1 and n2@127.0.0.1 . The sync_nodes_optional configuration specifies which nodes to attempt to connect to within the sync_nodes_timeout window, before continuing with startup. There is also a sync_nodes_mandatory key which can be used to enforce all nodes are connected within the timeout window or else the node terminates. With our sys.config in place, we can pass a VM -config flag to use our configuration when booting the Erlang VM. For example, you could start two iex sessions like this:

n1@host$ iex --name n1@127.0.0.1 --erl "-config sys.config" -S mix n2@host$ iex --name n2@127.0.0.1 --erl "-config sys.config" -S mix iex(n2@127.0.0.1)1> Node.list [:"n1@127.0.0.1"]

If you’re building Phoenix projects, you could start your servers like this:

n1@host$ elixir --name n1@127.0.0.1 --erl "-config sys.config" -S mix phoenix.server n2@host$ elixir --name n2@127.0.0.1 --erl "-config sys.config" -S mix phoenix.server

You might be wondering why we have to use Erlang-based configuration in our sys.config instead of Mix configuration. This is because the configuration must be passed to the Erlang VM when starting. By the time Mix configuration would be loaded, the VM has already booted. That said, we can use Mix configuration to drive our sync_nodes_optional list if we are using exrm to build releases for deployment. exrm builds your Mix configuration into a sys.config within the release, which lets you specify your node configuration like this, in your Mix config:

config :kernel, sync_nodes_optional: [:"n1@127.0.0.1", :"n2@127.0.0.1"], sync_nodes_timeout: 10000

Then you build and run your releases as normal and the proper VM configuration is provided when starting. For a complete rundown on using exrm to deploy a Phoenix project, see the official guide.

That’s all it takes to run distributed Elixir on a cluster of servers! The Erlang VM supports a number of more advanced options and strategies for running distributed applications, including automatic application failover to a configured subset of nodes, and more. See the Erlang documentation for a comprehensive rundown.