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 about testing, we went through a broad range of topics. Let's review the most important ones:

  • Testing in Elixir is powered by the thorough ExUnit framework, which enables us to create descriptive and concise tests that are able to run concurrently.
  • We can create function mocks in Elixir using the Mox library, allowing our tests to still run concurrently. Mocks have to be created based on a behaviour, so that the API of the mock and the real implementation don't diverge.
  • Ecto's modular design allows us to separate changeset tests (which verify our business logic) from repository tests (which verify our queries and the interaction with the database). In either case, we're able to run the tests concurrently.
  • Elixir provides a neat feature, called doctest, which enables us to embed tests inside the documentation that we write. These embedded tests ensure that the documentation is kept up to date, which is a key enabler for the first-class status of documentation in the Elixir...