🔗 Graceful startup and shutdown for Phoenix applications

If you’ve developed a Phoenix application, then you’ve heard how to keep a Phoenix application up and running—the BEAM is made for long-lived processes after all. But even long-lived processes need to end sometime. When a process ends it is important that you clean up what remains of that process or things will get messy.

Graceful Shutdown is the practice of cleaning up after all of your processes when the system shuts down. Luckily for us, many Phoenix applications do not need to worry about Graceful Shutdown because Phoenix already handles most of the hard bits for us. But if you are running additional processes then you may need to handle their shutdown concerns yourself. But not to worry! In this post I will help you land the plane safely. We’ll walk through Graceful Shutdown in general and one specific Graceful Shutdown behavior that we've implemented here at Felt.