The Rise of the Phoenix

Phoenix For the Rails People

I've been doing Rails for a long while now. Before Rails I was doing Enterprise Java but then my mentor at the time showed me this cool framework that took convention over configuration seriously and allowed really powerful things to be built quickly and easily. I was amazed and have been using tools like this ever since.

But the big argument against Rails is that it doesn't scale and is a bit bloated. Also there is a bit of a shift towards using more functional approaches. Enter my fascination with Elixir and Phoenix.

The next series of posts will be all about me learning Phoenix, but with a slant towards comparing and contrasting it against Rails. So strap in and take the journey with me.

I learn by doing, so I'll be building my normal 'hello world' type application, which is a library application. I used to spend a lot of time in libraries as a kid so I think thats the reason my default application is usually an application to track and catalog books. So let's get started.

Prerequisites

Before getting started, you will need to install a few things. I'll assume you are on mac and have homebrew installed. First is postgres.

brew update
brew install postgres
createuser -P -s -e root
# then setup your root user or whatever you want your user to be called

Next install Elixir and mix.

brew install elixir 
mix local.hex

Now install Phoenix.

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

Now we are ready to start building our app.

New Application

We will start first by creating the application. In rails we'd do something like:

rails new rails_library --database=postgresql

but in Phoenix we do:

mix phoenix.new phoenix_library

First thing to note here is `mix`, which is Elixir's build tool. Already a little different than the rails command. Also notice we run `phoenix.new` which really is nothing more than just a script that we run with mix. Lastly we pass it the name of the new project. Also notice that postgres is the default, so we don't have to tell it that we will be using it.

This command created a bunch of folders full of stuff, which we will get to as we need....which is right now. :) Open up the `dev.exs` file in the config dir and modify it as necessary to use the correct username and password to connect to your locally running postgres instance. Go ahead and do that for the `test.exs` file as well.

With that done, we can set up your db schemas by running:

mix ecto.create

# in rails we would do `rake db:create`

Very similar to rails, but instead of the rake command we use our Elixir build tool called mix, and we run the ecto.create script. Ecto is the database wrapper, so we will be seeing `Ecto` a lot.

The last thing we will do in our very gentle intro is to start the Phoenix server.

mix phoenix.server

# in rails we would do `rails server`

Then navigate to localhost:4000 and you will see the dummy page.

Next time we will be creating some models, views, and controllers. Until then!