Hello folks,

Hope you are well! Have been playing around with Elixir for a few months, loving the language I’m looking for advice on how to manage dependencies between multiple Elixir applications.

My intention is to build a backend system for a bank made up of many (100s, maybe 1000’s) separate independent applications that call into each other - I like the Elixir approach of building several smaller applications, but I am having some trouble setting up config & dependencies.

I don’t want to go the umbrella application route, since it sounds to me like all config would live in one place - I anticipate each application having its own configuration, and I’d like to be able to release individual applications without releasing a new version of the entire system (open to suggestions on this though?).

Pursuing this so far, I have a single Github repo holding multiple Elixir applications, each generated separately. My intention is that application A can call functions in application B - initially, to make that happen, I added application B as a local mix dependency in A.deps().

What I’ve found is that I have to add calls to import all config needed by application B inside application A, which feels wrong? (ex: A is a CLI tool which calls into B, which has some Ecto configuration and queries to return values; if I launch A, in order for A to call B’s public API functions, I have to import B’s config in A’s config files)

What am I missing here? The independent application approach makes a lot of sense to me and feels intuitive, but I’m not sure how to set it up so that these applications can fluidly call into each other while each application contains its own concerns like config, etc. I’m looking to set up something like a microservices design, where “services” are independent applications all running inside the BEAM.

Thank you in advance!