I might've misunderstood what you referred to in this particular case, but you generally don't need to even have Erlang installed on the target machine to ship Elixir (and/or Erlang) applications. Tools like Distillery make it easy (a boolean config value) to include the ERTS with your deployment, leaving you with a single .tar.gz to move to your target environment. The only caveat here is that the build machine and target machine architectures must match.