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

Summary


In this chapter, we looked at an Elixir project from different angles. Accompanied by the versatile Mix tool that comes with Elixir, we ended the chapter by kick-starting our ElixirDrip umbrella project with two umbrella applications. These were the key ideas we addressed here:

  • An Elixir application defines an application callback function that is called when the VM starts any project, such as the main entry point of other languages. If you don't need to start your application, you don't need to implement the callback function. In this case, your code will amount to a simple bundle of modules and functions without any state.
  • The Mix compile task compiles our code to BEAM bytecode and places every module under a flat folder structure, automatically creating an .app file for our project, so that the VM knows how to start every needed application.
  • An Elixir project is composed of a mix.exs file and three folders, config, lib and test. After creating your project, you get an out-of-the...