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Elixir

Building Compile-time Tools With Elixir's Compiler Tracing Features

Elixir 1.10 was recently released, and with that release came a little-known, but very interesting feature—compiler tracing. This feature means that as the Elixir compiler is compiling your code, it can emit messages whenever certain kinds of things are compiled. This ability to know what’s going on when Elixir is compiling our code might seem simple, but it actually opens up a lot of doors for opportunities to build customized compile-time tooling for Elixir applications.

Elixir Package 1.12: Phoenix 1.5 Support & Better Channel Error Handling

Great news for all the Elixir alchemists, we’ve just released AppSignal for Elixir package version 1.12.0 which adds support for the upcoming 1.5 version of the Phoenix framework, and improves in-channel error handling. If you’re not an AppSignal user yet, make sure to check out the product tour and see how errors, performance, host metrics and triggers all come together in one tool. Phoenix 1.5 isn’t here yet, but AppSignal 1.12 is ready for it.

Migrating Production Data in Elixir

When requirements change for your product, there arises a need to change not only the codebase but also the existing data that already lives in production. If you’re performing the changes locally, the whole process seems fairly simple. You test your new feature against a sparkling clean database, the test suite is green, and the feature looks great. Then you deploy, and everything goes to hell because you forgot that production was in a slightly different state.

Monitoring the Erlang VM With AppSignal's Magic Dashboard

Today, we will dive into one of the hard parts of using any monitoring - making sense out of all the data that is emitted. We think this is one of the hard parts. And being developers building for developers, we think a lot like you do – we think. Pun intended. Nowadays, we monitor AppSignal with AppSignal (on a separate setup), so we are still dogfooding all the time. We still run into challenges as you do, often before you.

How to Get Your Elixir Application Ready for CI/CD

In today’s post, we’ll go over what continuous integration and continuous delivery are, the benefits that come along with employing CI/CD, and some best practices that you should follow. We’ll also explore a wide array of Elixir ecosystem tools that can help you create top-notch CI pipelines. In order to experiment with a handful of the tools that we will be discussing, we’ll use a Git hooks Elixir library to execute our CI/CD validation steps, but on our local machine.

How to Use Broadway in Your Elixir Application

In today’s post, we will be covering the Elixir library named Broadway. This library is maintained by the kind folks at Plataformatec and allows us to create highly concurrent data processing pipelines with relative ease. After an overview of how Broadway works and when to use it, we’ll dive into a sample project where we’ll leverage Broadway to fetch temperature data from https://openweathermap.org/ in order to find the coldest city on earth.

Typespecs and Behaviours in Elixir

Today, we will dive into Typespecs and Behaviours. These are two Elixir features that we are ecstatic (pun intended) about. They are great examples of built-in features in Elixir that help get some of the advantages of statically typed code. Alright, let’s set the scene. Elixir is a dynamically typed language. This means that the type of each variable is not checked at compile-time, but rather at run-time. Like most things, this comes with advantages and disadvantages.

How to use Mint, an awesome HTTP library for Elixir - Part 01

Mint is a shiny new Elixir package which allows you to make HTTP requests using the HTTP 1 and HTTP 2 protocols. It can transparently handle ALPN (Application Layer Protocol Negotiation), which essentially means that it can figure out if a server uses HTTP2 or HTTP1 on its own. It also comes with an optional dependency on a castore package which verifies the SSL certificates of the servers (that you connect to).