funny enough, I just wanted to do the same thing. So I can give you better, albeit late answer.

In order to avoid writing mix test --no-test in command line, you can define an alias in your mix.exs file like this:

def project do
  [app: :core,
   ...
   aliases: [test: "test --no-start"],
   ...
   deps: deps()]
end

This way, whenever you run mix tests it will skip the starting application. Here’s a blog post I found on the subject that gives couple more extra tips:

https://virviil.github.io/2016/10/26/Elixir-Testing-without-starting-supervision-tree.html

The link to Virvill’s blog is dead now, but it is still available on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Thanks for the reply ,

I disagree a little with elixir doing this for unit tests as in most cases it’s a bit of an unnecessary overhead and sometimes in your Jenkins/GitLab/Travis test environment it’s not even possible to start all included applications.

EUnit tests are supposed to be lightweight, white-box function-by-function tests. ExUnit seems to be blurring the line between EUnit and CT, which may be the intention and I could just be stuck in my erlang ways.

But as you quite rightly pointed out the answer was staring me in the face in the documentation .