I remember trying to deploy it a couple years ago and it was fairly complicated. Granted, I was trying to deploy a multi-node mnesia cluster, which is probably what caused all my issues.
But for non-production single nodes I just created a Dockerfile and deployed it because the other options were too much hassle. Can't remember the details, but in my (in)experience, deploying was always the hard part with Elixir.
I will need to try it again, it's been a while and the ecosystem has improved dramatically in the meantime ... and it was already excellent before. Good stuff!
My view on Elixir deployment is that for a given complexity of setup, it's no harder than anything else. For a basic single node webserver, `mix release` makes it like releasing anything else (often more easily). For complex multi-node setups, yes there's some hard work to do, just like there with on any other platform. The difference is that the development experience of getting to a working stable multi-node setup is so much easier on Elixir than anything else that you notice the difficult deployment more.