Hi @JohnSmall, the error happens if the mix format command runs in wrong directory. I guess it is caused by the Elixir plugin used in Atom. You can try VSCode and install the “ElixirLS Fork” extension.

Which addons exactly? What version of Elixir / Erlang / Phoenix?
Does the formatter give the same error if you run it from the command line?

For reference, I don’t see any such errors with these installed:

• atom-elixir 0.2.3
• atom-elixir-formatter 1.0.6
• language-elixir 0.23.0
• linter-elixir-credo 1.1.0

Hi @JohnSmall did you per chance use the latest version of ecto instead of the version specified in the Phoenix book? In the latest version of Ecto, you need to add :ecto_sql as an additional dependency now, it was extracted from ecto proper.

Yes it is the latest version of Phoenix. But it’s automatically added :ecto_sql to deps in mix.exs. Here’s the code

defp deps do
    [
      {:phoenix, "~> 1.4.11"},
      {:phoenix_pubsub, "~> 1.1"},
      {:phoenix_ecto, "~> 4.0"},
      {:ecto_sql, "~> 3.1"},
      {:postgrex, ">= 0.0.0"},
      {:phoenix_html, "~> 2.11"},
      {:phoenix_live_reload, "~> 1.2", only: :dev},
      {:gettext, "~> 0.11"},
      {:jason, "~> 1.0"},
      {:plug_cowboy, "~> 2.0"}
    ]
  end

As you can see :ecto_sql is definitely there.

Good point, what happens when I run from the command line? Ans: no errors.

Which prompts the question where are the Atom addons getting the error message from? I’m using

• atom-elixir 0.2.3
• atom-elixir-formatter 1.0.6
• language-elixir 0.23.0
• linter-elixir-credo 1.1.0

Exactly the same as you. Are there special settings that have to be configured for these addons?

Do you start your editor from a GUI or from the terminal, if you open it from the terminal, do you see the same error?

I get the same error if I start Atom from the command line as I do when starting it from the Mac dock toolbar.

Well not quite the same error, the error comes up twice instead of just once.

By disabling and enabling the packages I can see that the error is generated by atom-elixir-formatter v1.0.6.

There doesn’t seem to be much configuration that can be changed, other than the executable it calls. Which is the default elixir.

I checked the Github repo for the package and found other people with the same problem Running in subdirectory with `.formatter.exs` file breaks · Issue #26 · rgreenjr/atom-elixir-formatter · GitHub but the author doesn’t have time to fix it. Sigh

Just to make sure, do you start it from the project folder than?

Quite often those problems arise from the processes working dir is incorrect.

Just tried it and it makes no difference. Which is reasonable because it checks the formats on all other files in the project correctly.

If I had to start Atom from the command line in the root directory of the project to get it to work that would be crazy as I have 5 projects open at once.

As the author doesn’t have time to fix the problem I’ll investigate a bit to see if I can diagnose what’s going wrong.