Sinan Releases and Being Right

Fred, of Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good, today posted on his blog about the problems around how rebar handles releases, Rebar Releases and Being Wrong. The problems he mentions and a few others are why, despite giving it a legitimate shot, I have found rebar unusable for my workflow to be efficient and stable while adhering to OTP standards at the same time.

I suggest first reading his post, if you already use rebar, and then continuing on with the rest of this.

I’ll start with an example on the generation of a project containing two applications and a dependency from one of those applications of cowboy. Next, I’ll create a release (and in the process a deployable target system) to show the difference in how sinan handles this process.

TL;DR Sinan does OTP the right way, rebar does not.

First, you can download the latest version sinan from this link, it is simply an executable escript, so ‘chmod +x sinan’ and put it in your PATH and you are good to go.

Sinan provides a ‘gen’ command to create your project. I include the output of the steps I took to build this project. Sinan assumes this is a multiple application project, but if you give “y” instead it will create a directory structure similar to rebars default structure with a src/ directory instead of a lib/ directory.

We now have a project named rel_example and can see the generated contents.

Before going further I add the line {include_erts, true}. to sinan.config so that a generated tarball of the release contains erts and can be booted on a machine without Erlang installed.

A tree structure view of the generated project is below:

You’ll see we have a lib directory with two applications containing their source files under a src directory. Now in order to boot the release we’ll create, we need to remove a couple tings from each supervisor. Instead of creating something for them to supervise just remove the variable AChild and replace [AChild] with [].

Next, so we have a third party dependency in the example, add cowboy to the applications in nano lib/app_1/src/app_1.app.src:

Sinan provides a depends command to show the depenedencies of the project and where they are located:

Now lets build a release and target system.

After running the dist command we have a _build directory that we find the following structure. I removed the files/dirs under each app to shorten the listing.

Sinan has created a lib directory containing all necessary applications for our release as well as the needed files for booting the release. Additionally the dist command creates a tar.gz for easy deployment. But if we simply want to run our release where we are we can:

This is only the tip of the iceberg of what sinan is capable of. I can’t go into all of it here but I’ll mention that you are able to define multiple releases for a project to generate and which of your project apps to include in each. Additionally you are able to provide a custom rel file if you require tweaks.

The important part to take away from this post is the structure of what you are working with when using sinan and how it is based on OTP standards, both for the source you work on and the results of the build process under _build/.