There is no magic in Elixir!

If you’re anything like me, you probably started to learn Elixir and wanted to skip to the shiny stuff right away. Sure there’s some basics to sift through like the data types and specific syntax elements but after that, we can finally build a distributed, scalable, performant masterpiece of an application! - Riiigt? Granted, even if you’re a bit more of a sane person, once you get to work with Supervisor, GenServer, Agent and other modules alike, you can’t help but feel that things have been simplified a lot for you. Continue reading

Serving static assets on a subpath in Phoenix

If you create a new Phoenix project, without using the --no-html flag, a static plug will be added to your endpoint. Because of this, a lot of people recommend to just edit that, if you want to serve static files from a subdirectory. However, this can get a bit tricky if you have data stored in different directories - or use Phoenix purely as an API. When someone asked about this on the elixir-lang Slack, my first response was: Continue reading

Phoenix end-to-end testing in real life

There are lots of articles on testing in Elixir, and probably ten times as many for each Javascript frontend framework. But what if we want to test all of it together? - Be advised that end-to-end tests do not replace unit and integration tests on either the backend or frontend, however, I think they do have their place in a good test suite for the following reasons: We can test for specific user workflows that caused issues in the past to ensure these stay fixed forever. Continue reading

Elixir: Testing protected Phoenix controllers

Testing protected endpoints in Phoenix controllers is a topic that sparks confusion - at best, and controversy at worst - amongst a surprising lot of people. When using Guardian or other pluggable ways of authorizing requests, this behaviour has to be taken into consideration for controller tests. Multiple pull requests in the Guardian repository were working towards a solution for this, Guardian Backdoor, which has now been moved into its own repository. Continue reading