Naming Processes Using the Registry
Until now, we used the process identifier we obtained from starting the process to interact with it. However, we can optionally provide a :name value when starting a process, which can be used later on instead of a PID. This way you don’t have to keep track of the PIDs of the processes you’re starting. Functions like GenServer.cast/2 and GenServer.call/3 also accept a name instead of a process identifier, and you’ve already seen how to use Process.whereis/1 to find out the PID for JobRunner.
To make working with names easier, Elixir comes with a module called Registry. It is a very efficient key-value store with some useful functionality. Let’s see how we can use it.
Processes can be named when they start ...
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