Testing Elixir

Testing a GenServer

Let’s refresh our memory: a GenServer is a process that holds state and optionally provides an interface to read or update that state. OTP abstracts all of the common parts of a GenServer, like spawning the process, having a receive loop, and sending messages. What’s left to the user is to implement callbacks that implement code that’s specific to a particular GenServer.

We’ll see how we can make use of a GenServer in the Soggy Waffle application, but we’d like to start off with a self-contained example. It’s going to make things easier when illustrating some concepts. We’ll use a GenServer that provides a simple rolling average of the last N numeric measurements given to it. We can start with a simple implementation by ...