Hey everyone! It’s been a while, but I am back with a quick post for helping us Elixir devs out there.
Coming from the Ruby world, many of us have come to depend on the awesome gem by the name of Pry. Pry’s name to fame is allowing you to drop into your running code at a given breakpoint. This is extremely helpful when triaging tests and inspecting code on the fly. One of the neat things about Pry, is that is allows access to your entire environment.
What does that have to do with Elixir?
Great question! The Elixir team has already incorporated Pry like capabilities into IEx and you can read more about it from this Plataformatec blog post. I am not really here to help you use Pry, but I am here to help you get to a pry like state when running IEx.
I have been using IEx a lot during the development of a project at work. Coming in and out of IEx sessions has led to me to retyping a bunch of my aliases for all my models/controllers/modules/etc. This can become really tedious! After doing some digging I came across the .iex.exs file. This is a config file that alows us to configure our iex experience. Which means we can tailor it to our needs!
My elevated developer experience
When we run iex -S mix, it will read from our .iex.exs file and load the code. Which means we can do our aliasing inside this file. We are opting for a local file, because each one of our repos will probably need different configurations.
So for our case, we can create a .iex.exs file in the root of our project:
touch .iex.exs
Then proceed to alias the things we want. I found a neat way to do multiple imports on one line from the Elixir Getting Started Docs
alias MyApp.{Module1, Module2, Controller1, MyModel}
When we load up iex -S mix, we are dropped into our environment like normal, but now the things we care about are aliased!
Local vs Global Config Files
In this huge blob of text in the documentation, you can see what I am talking about:
When starting, IEx looks for a local .iex.exs file (located in the current working directory), then a global one (located at ~/.iex.exs) and loads the first one it finds (if any).
So it’s important to remember that you can cause havoc if you have a local and a global .iex.exs file. I would probably stick with only local config files.
Word of Warning
In Elixir, we like our namespacing. But we also like our development experience. There’s a small compromise if we have modules that share the same name as an already aliased module. I’ve personally ran into naming collisions around Elixir.Node, which has a different context than MyApp.Node but calling Node.connect is referrring to MyApp.Node.connect. So just be sure to please use responsibly!
As always! Happy Hacking!
Nick