Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By : André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha
Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By: André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha

Overview of this book

Running concurrent, fault-tolerant applications that scale is a very demanding responsibility. After learning the abstractions that Elixir gives us, developers are able to build such applications with inconceivable low effort. There is a big gap between playing around with Elixir and running it in production, serving live requests. This book will help you fll this gap by going into detail on several aspects of how Elixir works and showing concrete examples of how to apply the concepts learned to a fully ?edged application. In this book, you will learn how to build a rock-solid application, beginning by using Mix to create a new project. Then you will learn how the use of Erlang's OTP, along with the Elixir abstractions that run on top of it (such as GenServer and GenStage), that allow you to build applications that are easy to parallelize and distribute. You will also master supervisors (and supervision trees), and comprehend how they are the basis for building fault-tolerant applications. Then you will use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application. Upon fnishing implementation, you will learn how to take your application to the cloud, using Kubernetes to automatically deploy, scale, and manage it. Last, but not least, you will keep your peace of mind by learning how to thoroughly test and then monitor your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
5
Demand-Driven Processing
Index

Elixir project structure


In the previous section, we created a sample project with Mix, but we didn't explore it thoroughly. Despite not enforcing a rigid structure and looking really simple, the Elixir project structure sets the baseline of every project, enabling you to get up to speed when facing a new codebase.

Let's create a simpler project, using mix new simple_project to generate the initial folder structure for us. Besides creating the .gitignore and README.md files, it also created the mix.exs file and three separate folders: config, lib and test. Take a look at this:

$ mix new simple_project
* creating README.md
* creating .gitignore
* creating mix.exs
* creating config
* creating config/config.exs
* creating lib
* creating lib/simple_project.ex
* creating test
* creating test/test_helper.exs
* creating test/simple_project_test.exs

Your Mix project was created successfully.
You can use "mix" to compile it, test it, and more:

    cd simple_project
    mix test

Run "mix help" for...