Nova utilizes relx for building releases and has a particular profile defined for creating such. In a standard Nova-project there will be two profiles defined; devand prod. The dev-profile is used for local development and the prod-profile is used for building releases.
So in order to build a release for production, you would run the following command:
$ rebar3 as prod tar
This builds a release and archives it into a tar-file. As default erts is included in the release, but this can be configured through the options in rebar.config. To read more about release handling and configuration options we recommend reading relx-manual.
If you are inexperienced with building releases we recommend reading the relx-manual.