MIX(1) BSD General Commands Manual MIX(1)NAMEmix — The software project management tool
SYNOPSISmix [TASK] [project_name]
elixir [OPTIONS] -Smix [TASK] [project_name]
DESCRIPTIONmix is intended for both organizing code into projects and their mainte‐
nance. For the latter the tool offers some advanced features like depen‐
dency management, packaging, preparing documentation, testing and so on.
Have a look at the SYNOPSIS section and the second way of running mix it
offers. The point is that the tool is none other than the Elixir script,
therefore it can be invoked via elixir(1) in the same way as any other
script. It's useful when you want to run mix with particular options.
DEFINITIONS
All the mix functionality is represented by a set of tasks. A task is a
piece of code written in Elixir and intended for solving a particular
problem. Like programs, many tasks accept input parameters and/or support
options which slightly modify their behaviour, but others do not. There
are two types of tasks: those that are available after installation this
or that archive (local tasks) and those that are offered by mix (built-in
tasks). The run task will be executed by default if none other has been
specified.
In spite of the fact that the greater part of mix is tasks, the man page
doesn't contain the help information related to each of them because mix
is self-descriptive. Thus, using the help task, you can get both the full
list of local/built-in tasks and the information related to a particular
task.
An archive, in terms of Erlang, is the ZIP file with the .ez extension
which contains a precompiled Erlang application with all its dependen‐
cies[1].
An application is an entity that helps to combine sets of components into
a single unit to simplify their reusing in other systems[2].
ENVIRONMENT
MIX_ARCHIVE
Allows specifying the directory into which the archives should be
installed (see mix help archive.install). The ~/.mix/archives
directory is used for this purpose by default.
MIX_DEBUG
When set, outputs debug information about each task before run‐
ning it.
MIX_ENV
Allows specifying which environment should be used. The dev envi‐
ronment is used by default if none other has been specified.
Sometimes you have to use a particular set of configuration
parameter values or perform particular steps when you compile or
run a project (or in some other cases). The mix environments
allow grouping values of configuration parameters and steps to
switch between them by specifying the necessary environment via
MIX_ENV.
MIX_EXS
Allows changing the full path to the mix.exs file (see FILES
section). The most obvious use case is to have more than one
copy of mix.exs in a project, but it's worth noting that MIX_EXS
should be used only if the mix environments (see above) are not
enough to solve the problem.
MIX_HOME
Stores configuration files and scripts shared by multiple mix
implementations.
See the Mix.Utils.mix_home/0 function.
MIX_PATH
Allows expanding the code path. If the MIX_PATH environment vari‐
able has a value which consists of multiple paths, they must be
colon-separated (for Unix-like operating systems) or semicolon-
separated (for Windows).
As has already been mentioned above, there are two types of
tasks: local and built-in. These tasks are always visible for mix
because the directories, in which they are located, are a part of
code path. If a task belongs to neither the one type nor the
other, MIX_PATH helps you say to mix where it should search the
task.
Use the :code.get_path/0 function to get the list of paths which
are a part of the code path by default and the
Mix.Utils.mix_paths/0 function to get the list of paths specified
in the MIX_PATH value.
MIX_QUIET
When set, does not print information messages to the terminal.
FILES
mix.exs
Contains the most significant information related to the project,
such as its name, version, list of dependencies and so on. As a
rule, the file is named mix.exs and located at the top of the
project's source tree, but you can change the full path to it
using the MIX_EXS environment variable (see the ENVIRONMENT
section).
mix.lock
Allows locking down the project dependencies with a proper ver‐
sion range before performing any updates. It is useful when you
know that your project is incompatible with newer versions of
certain dependencies. The file is located at the top of the
project's source tree as well as mix.exs (see above).
REFERENCES
[1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/code.html#id103620
[2] http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/applications.html
SEE ALSOelixir(1), elixirc(1), iex(1)AUTHOR
This manual page contributed by Evgeny Golyshev.
INTERNET RESOURCES
Main website: http://elixir-lang.org
Documentation: http://elixir-lang.org/docs.html
General Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/group/elixir-lang-talk
Development Mailing List:
https://groups.google.com/group/elixir-lang-core
BSD May 27, 2015 BSD
