Programming Ecto

Chapter 15Optimizing IEx for Ecto

A perk of working with Elixir is IEx, Elixir’s interactive console. With IEx you can peer into a running system to see what’s going, or dash out lines of code you’d like to try. For projects using Ecto, IEx provides an alternative to your database console when you want to look up or change parts of your data. Instead of writing raw SQL, you can use Ecto, as done many times in this book.

An often-overlooked benefit of IEx is that it’s customizable. When it first launches, it looks for a file called .iex.exs in the current working directory, and then, if it didn’t find it, in the user’s home directory. If it finds the file, it evaluates it within the same environment as your console session. This means that you ...