Book Image

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
Book Image

Learning Elixir

By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Elixir
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Mix – the ladle of Elixir


So far, we have only interacted with simple modules defined in scripts or the interactive prompt. But this will only take us so far. Eventually, we will need more than just scripts. We will need a source tree that encloses our project's code. Moreover, we will need a tool to create the source tree, build the source, test, manage dependencies, and a number of other tasks. That tool is mix.

This tool handles everything we could need from a build tool. It creates projects, compiles code, runs tests, packages projects into distributable units, and even allows us to run our project, importing the necessary files into iex.

But enough about mix, let's use it and see it in action!

First, like any good command, mix comes with the trusty help command to give us a good list of what it can do for us:

$ mix help
mix                   # Run the default task (current: mix run)
mix app.start         # Start all registered apps
mix archive           # List all archives
mix archive...