← Back to context

Comment by johnisgood

2 days ago

Yes, of course. You are right.

I tend to build my prototypes as single file Elixir scripts. These are sometimes rather bulky with a bunch of logic and IO modules with some helper modules on the side. It's only when I believe in the idea that I reach for phx_new and start writing tests and copying in code into a full Phoenix project.

When I started out with Phoenix I learned a lot from studying the boilerplate it can generate. If you just need a route and serve some JSON or a file on it you can turn off most of the code generation and do precisely that, in case you're sure that's what you want. I think the default being that you can immediately flesh out auth and CRUD for whatever tabular data model you want is rather sensible.

  • I typically use specific flags to "mix phx.new" that gets rid most of the files, especially JavaScript and whatnot. I am not at my PC right now and I forgot the flags, but I am sure you know what I am referring to.

    I never tried starting with Elixir scripts, I will give that a try.

    • Someone linked the Plug docs elsewhere in this subthread, those show you how you can quickly launch a web server from a single file, including one with WebSocket capability.

      In my opinion Elixir scripts punch way above their weight. It's trivial to pull in the same dependencies as you would in a full project and you can easily keep a set of five or ten template scripts just laying around and copy those when you want a quick start with some boilerplate for a set of dependencies that often comes in handy. You could do something similar with mix plugins but it requires a bit more effort.

      4 replies →