Run Play application in production mode using dist taks - deployment

Question

I am using 'dist' task to generate a distribution of my play application. But if I unzip the generated artifact, in the bin/ directory I have access to the bash file generated by the 'dist' task. The last line of the script is : run "$#"
I saw in the official Play Framework documentation that 'run' command should not be used in production mode, and the recommended way is to generated a distribution with task 'dist'
Why 'dist' is generating a bash script which is using 'run' commmand if it is not recommended in production mode?
I am asking this, because when I deploy my application in production, the first request is slow...it seems the development behavior. But I am using the 'dist' command.
I would appreciate any help.
Thank you.

Answer 1

You are mixing two different things.
The run command stated in the Play documentation is a SBT command, that will start your app in dev mode. So to use that command you have to use activator or sbt (ex: ./activator run).
The run you see in that script is a bash function (defined a little above), that will start your app in production mode. A little snippet from that function:
# Actually runs the script.
run() {
# TODO - check for sane environment
# process the combined args, then reset "$#" to the residuals
# (...)
execRunner "$java_cmd" \
${java_opts[#]} \
"${java_args[#]}" \
-cp "$(fix_classpath "$app_classpath")" \
"${mainclass[#]}" \
"${app_commands[#]}" \
"${residual_args[#]}"
(...)
}
So, if you use this script to run your app, it will start in production mode.