man mix (1): The software project management tool

SYNOPSIS

[TASK ] [project_name ]
elixir [OPTIONS ] -S
[TASK ] [project_name ]

DESCRIPTION

is intended for both organizing code into projects and their maintenance. For the latter the tool offers some advanced features like dependency management, packaging, preparing documentation, testing and so on.

Have a look at the SYNOPSIS section and the second way of running it offers. The point is that the tool is none other than the Elixir script, therefore it can be invoked via elixir(1) in the same way as any other script. It's useful when you want to run with particular options.

DEFINITIONS

All the functionality is represented by a set of tasks. A task is a piece of code written in Elixir and intended for solving a particular problem. Like programs, many tasks accept input parameters and/or support options which slightly modify their behaviour, but others do not. There are two types of tasks: those that are available after installation this or that archive (local tasks) and those that are offered by (built-in tasks) The run task will be executed by default if none other has been specified.

In spite of the fact that the greater part of is tasks, the man page doesn't contain the help information related to each of them because is self-descriptive. Thus, using the help task, you can get both the full list of local/built-in tasks and the information related to a particular task.

An archive in terms of Erlang, is the ZIP file with the .ez extension which contains a precompiled Erlang application with all its dependencies[1].

An application is an entity that helps to combine sets of components into a single unit to simplify their reusing in other systems[2].

ENVIRONMENT

MIX_ARCHIVE

Allows specifying the directory into which the archives should be installed (see mix help archive.install ) The ~/.mix/archives directory is used for this purpose by default.

MIX_DEBUG

When set, outputs debug information about each task before running it.

MIX_ENV

Allows specifying which environment should be used. The dev environment is used by default if none other has been specified.

Sometimes you have to use a particular set of configuration parameter values or perform particular steps when you compile or run a project (or in some other cases) The environments allow grouping values of configuration parameters and steps to switch between them by specifying the necessary environment via MIX_ENV.

MIX_EXS

Allows changing the full path to the mix.exs file (see FILES section ) The most obvious use case is to have more than one copy of mix.exs in a project, but it's worth noting that MIX_EXS should be used only if the environments (see above) are not enough to solve the problem.

MIX_HOME

Stores configuration files and scripts shared by multiple implementations.

See the Mix.Utils.mix_home/0 function.

MIX_PATH

Allows expanding the code path. If the MIX_PATH environment variable has a value which consists of multiple paths, they must be colon-separated (for Unix-like operating systems) or semicolon-separated (for Windows)

As has already been mentioned above, there are two types of tasks: local and built-in. These tasks are always visible for because the directories, in which they are located, are a part of code path. If a task belongs to neither the one type nor the other, MIX_PATH helps you say to where it should search the task.

Use the :code.get_path/0 function to get the list of paths which are a part of the code path by default and the Mix.Utils.mix_paths/0 function to get the list of paths specified in the MIX_PATH value.

MIX_QUIET

When set, does not print information messages to the terminal.

FILES

mix.exs: Contains the most significant information related to the project, such as its name, version, list of dependencies and so on. As a rule, the file is named mix.exs and located at the top of the project's source tree, but you can change the full path to it using the MIX_EXS environment variable (see the ENVIRONMENT section )
mix.lock: Allows locking down the project dependencies with a proper version range before performing any updates. It is useful when you know that your project is incompatible with newer versions of certain dependencies. The file is located at the top of the project's source tree as well as mix.exs (see above)

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/code.html#id103620
[2] http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/applications.html

AUTHOR

This manual page contributed by Evgeny Golyshev.

INTERNET RESOURCES

Main website: http://elixir-lang.org
Documentation: http://elixir-lang.org/docs.html
General Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/group/elixir-lang-talk
Development Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/group/elixir-lang-core