Configuring a new project with Ecto

For this project, we'll be working with a plain Elixir mix project without Phoenix.

Creation and deps

To create it, enter the following from the terminal:

mix new linkly --sup
cd linkly

We need the --sup flag so that the project has a supervisor. This is for Ecto. Next, open up your project in your favorite editor, open the mix.exs file and then add Ecto and Postgrex (a Postgres library) to your project's deps:

defp deps do
  [
    {:postgrex, ">= 0.0.0"},
    {:ecto_sql, "~> 3.1"}
    # {:dep_from_hexpm, "~> 0.3.0"},
    # {:dep_from_git, git: "https://github.com/elixir-lang/my_dep.git", tag: "0.1.0"}
  ]
end

To fetch the deps, run

mix deps.get

Creating the repo

Create a repo file in the lib/linkly directory called, repo.ex and add the following contents to configure your Ecto repo:

defmodule Linkly.Repo do
  use Ecto.Repo,
    otp_app: :linkly,
    adapter: Ecto.Adapters.Postgres
end

The repo also needs to be added into the supervision tree of the app, inside the start function in application.ex.

  def start(_type, _args) do
    children = [
      Linkly.Repo

Configuration

Mix projects no longer generate configuration files by default, but we need some configuration in order to connect to a database. Create a config directory at the top level of your project and then a config.exs file in it to hold your default configuration and a dev.exs to hold the dev environment-specific configuration.

In config.exs, we'll add the ecto repos config and import the appropriate config for our environment:

use Mix.Config

config :linkly, :ecto_repos, [Linkly.Repo]

import_config "#{Mix.env()}.exs"

We'll put off creating the prod.exs and test.exs config files for now and just create a dev.exs with our database credentials:

use Mix.Config

config :linkly, Linkly.Repo,
  username: "postgres",
  password: "postgres",
  database: "linkly_dev",
  hostname: "localhost"