In a command-line session, enter mix help to see a list of available tasks:

> mix help

Here is what the screen will look like:

To generate a new application, type mix new simple_app:

> mix new simple_app

What happens next is shown in the following screenshot:

Inside the simple_app directory, the generated application is ready to be started. Run iex –S mix to start the application and verify that everything is working:

> iex -S mix
Erlang/OTP 17 [erts-6.1] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false] [dtrace]
Interactive Elixir (0.15.1) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)
iex(1)>  

Nothing happened. So is it working? The absence of messages in the IEx session is a good thing. This generated application behaves more like a library; there's no main function like in Java or C. To be sure that the application is responding, edit the lib/simple_app.ex file by inserting the following code:

defmodule SimpleApp do
  def greet do
    IO.puts "Hello from Simple App!"
  end
end

Restart the application by pressing Ctrl + C twice and entering iex –S mix again.

In the IEx session, enter SimpleApp.greet.

You will see the following output from the application:

iex(1)> SimpleApp.greet
Hello from Simple App!
:ok
iex(2)>