Taking Off with Phoenix

Please take a look at this list and make sure to install anything necessary for your system. Having dependencies installed in advance will allow us to hit the ground running and cover the most material possible.

Installing dependencies

Elixir

Phoenix is written in Elixir, and our application code will also be written in Elixir. We won't get far in a Phoenix app without it! The Elixir site maintains a great Installation Page to help.

If we have just installed Elixir for the first time, we will need to install the Hex package manager as well. Hex is necessary to get a Phoenix app running (by installing dependencies) and to install any extra dependencies we might need along the way.

Here's the command to install Hex:

$ mix local.hex

Erlang

Elixir code compiles to Erlang byte code to run on the Erlang virtual machine. Without Erlang, Elixir code has no virtual machine to run on, so we need to install Erlang as well.

When we install Elixir using instructions from the Elixir Installation Page, we will usually get Erlang too. If Erlang was not installed along with Elixir, please see the Erlang Instructions section of the Elixir Installation Page for instructions.

node.js (>= 0.12.0)

Node is an optional dependency. Phoenix will use brunch.io to compile static assets (javascript, css, etc), by default. Brunch.io uses the node package manager (npm) to install its dependencies, and npm requires node.js.

We can get node.js from the download page. When selecting a package to download, it's important to note that Phoenix requires version 0.12.0 or greater.

Mac OS X users can also install node.js via homebrew.

Note: io.js, which is an npm compatible platform originally based on Node.js, is not known to work with Phoenix.

Debian/Ubuntu users might see an error that looks like this:

sh: 1: node: not found
npm WARN This failure might be due to the use of legacy binary "node"

This is due to Debian having conflicting binaries for node: discussion on stackoverflow

There are two options to fix this problem, either:

• install nodejs-legacy:

$ apt-get install nodejs-legacy

or

• create a symlink

$ ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node

PostgreSQL

We will be interacting with a database while building our application. Phoenix uses the database abstraction library Ecto which supports a number of databases.

For this workshop, we'll be using PostgreSQL for consistency across attendees.

The PostgreSQL wiki has installation guides for a number of different systems.

inotify-tools (for linux users)

This is a Linux-only filesystem watcher that Phoenix uses for live code reloading. (Mac OS X or Windows users can safely ignore it.)

Linux users need to install this dependency. Please consult the inotify-tools wiki for distribution-specific installation instructions.

Phoenix

Once we have Elixir and Erlang, we are ready to install the Phoenix mix archive. A mix archive is a zip file which contains an application as well as its compiled beam files. It is tied to a specific version of the application. The archive is what we will use to generate a new, base Phoenix application which we can build from.

Here's the command to install the Phoenix archive for version 1.0.2:

$ mix archive.install https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/releases/download/v1.0.2/phoenix_new-1.0.2.ez

Note: if the Phoenix archive won't install properly with this command, we can download the file directly from our browser, save it to the filesystem, and then run: mix archive.install /path/to/local/phoenix_new.ez.

Generating the application

We're going to generate a new Phoenix application to work with throughout this workshop. We'll call it support. Navigate to a place on your filesystem where you want to work from and run the following:

$ mix phoenix.new support
* creating support/config/config.exs
* creating support/config/dev.exs
* creating support/config/prod.exs
* creating support/config/prod.secret.exs
...
* creating support/config/test.exs
* creating support/lib/support.ex
* creating support/lib/support/endpoint.ex
* creating support/mix.exs
* creating support/README.md

Make sure to say Y when prompted to fetch and install dependencies and follow the directions in the console to get everything running.

Fetch and install dependencies? [Yn] Y
* running npm install && node node_modules/brunch/bin/brunch build
* running mix deps.get

We are all set! Run your Phoenix application:

    $ cd support
    $ mix ecto.create
    $ mix phoenix.server

    You can also run your app inside IEx (Interactive Elixir) as:

    $ iex -S mix phoenix.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser and see your new Phoenix app running. Yay!

Having trouble?

It is vital that we get all the setup dealt with prior to the workshop so that we can focus on learning as much as possible with the limited time. Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any trouble with getting anything setup.