Don't worry - this is an accurate and concise summary of what Nerves is. What I would add is: you do not have bash (or sh, or any other "conventional" shell).

Don't worry - this is an accurate and concise summary of what Nerves is. What I would add is: you do not have bash (or sh, or any other "conventional" shell). The BEAM is your userspace. You can SSH in, but what you end up with is an IEx prompt (the Elixir REPL). This is surprisingly fine once you get used to it (and once you've built a few helpers for your usecase).