Lately I’ve been looking at the Phoenix web framework for the Elixir language. Phoenix has taken a lot of inspiration from Rails, and the structure of a project feels somewhat familiar if you’ve worked with Rails.

To get familiar with the framework, I’m starting with a simple CRUD app using Phoenix’s scaffolding generator. This post won’t go into the code in much detail, and instead, I’m trying to just get a basic app running using Phoenix, much like Rails’ infamous 15-minute blog app. Here, I’m using Elixir 1.0.2, Phoenix 0.13.1 and Postgres 9.4.0 on OS X Mavericks.

Installing Phoenix:

If you haven’t installed Elixir already, you can do so by brew install elixir , or the equivalent for your OS. Now we need the hex package manager to install Phoenix. We can install hex by:

mix local.hex

Once hex is installed, we can use it to install Phoenix like this:

mix archive.install https://github.com/phoenixframework/archives/raw/master/phoenix_new.ez

It appears that future versions of Phoenix will support installation via a mix archive.install phoenix command. This installs Phoenix and also provide the mix phoenix.new command to generate a new Phoenix project.

Generating a new project:

To generate the project, we will use the phoenix.new mix task. This sets up the project and installs the dependencies.

$ mix phoenix.new blog

Phoenix uses Brunch to manage the front end assets, and brunch is a node.js module. So you will first need to make sure that node installed on your machine.

Running Phoenix server:

Enter the blog directory and run the mix phoenix.server command to start running the app. It will first compile all the required modules and then show the message: “Running Blog.Endpoint with Cowboy on port 4000 (http)”.

$ cd blog/ $ mix phoenix.server

If everything went smoothly, you will see a “Welcome to Phoenix” message at localhost:3000.

Livereload FTW!

One of the things that really impressed me was that livereload is built into the framework. To check this out, edit the home page template, web/templates/page/index.html.eex and change “Welcome to Phoenix!” to “Welcome to my blog!”.

Now go back to the browser, and voila, the text has already changed without having to reload the page.

Setting up the database

Before we can start adding our database tables, we need to set up the database. Open up config/dev.exs , and edit the username and password near the bottom of the file. (They will both be set to “postgres” by default.)

# config/dev.exs config :blog , Blog . Repo , adapter: Ecto . Adapters . Postgres , username: "tyrion" , password: "casterlyrock" , database: "blog_dev" , size: 10 # The amount of database connections in the pool

Next, let us create the database using the mix ecto.create task.

$ mix ecto.create Compiled ... ... Generated blog.app The database for Blog.Repo has been created.

Now our database is all set, and we can proceed to generating our scaffolded Post model.

Creating our posts resource

Phoenix gives us a phoenix.gen.html task similar to Rails’ rails generate scaffold . Here we create a Post model, with the database called posts and two fields:

$ mix phoenix.gen.html Post posts title body:text

This generates a simple scaffold to create, read, update and delete posts. The command produces this output:

* creating priv/repo/migrations/20150527180842_create_post.exs * creating web/models/post.ex * creating test/models/post_test.exs * creating web/controllers/post_controller.ex * creating web/templates/post/edit.html.eex * creating web/templates/post/form.html.eex * creating web/templates/post/index.html.eex * creating web/templates/post/new.html.eex * creating web/templates/post/show.html.eex * creating web/views/post_view.ex * creating test/controllers/post_controller_test.exs Add the resource to the proper scope in web/router.ex: resources "/posts", PostController and then update your repository by running migrations: $ mix ecto.migrate

This gives you a handy list of files that you can explore to get an idea about what Phoenix controllers, models and views look like. (Note - the equivalent of Rails views is called templates in Phoenix. What we call views in Phoenix are similar to presenters in Rails.)

Now let’s follow the instructions at the end of that output. First, we’ll add the routes to the appropriate section of the router at web/router.ex :

defmodule Blog . Router do use Blog . Web , :router # other stuff scope "/" , ElixirBlog do pipe_through :browser # Use the default browser stack get "/" , PageController , :index resources "/posts" , PostController end end

And now, we can run the migrations to create the posts table:

$ mix ecto.migrate ... [ info] == Running Blog.Repo.Migrations.CreatePost.change/0 forward [ info] create table posts [ info] == Migrated in 0.1s

At this point we will need to restart the Phoenix server. Going to localhost:4000/posts will show you the generated scaffold for posts. Click the “new post” link and add some posts. The list of posts also shows options to edit and delete these posts.

Routing /posts as our homepage

Now that we’ve added posts, let’s replace the default homepage with the list of posts. For this, we can edit web/router.ex :

- get "/", PageController, :index + get "/", PostController, :index

Now localhost:4000/ shows the list of posts.

Running tests

When we generated the scaffold, Phoenix also generated two test files for Post model and PostController . Taking a look at these generated tests gives an idea about how we could go about writing our own tests.

You can run the tests by mix test . Before you can run the tests, you might need to edit the test database configuration in config/test.exs like we did for config/dev.exs .

Final thoughts

I loved how easy it was to get started with Phoenix, but CRUD apps aren’t Phoenix’s biggest selling point. I’m going to try out the more interesting features of Phoenix, like Channels, which allows us to add realtime features to our apps. Next I want to try out building a simple chat app using channels.