I’m excited to share Merquery, a new library I’m working on to bring interactive HTTP tooling to Elixir.

This project started off as a way to practice making Livebook Smart Cells, where I wanted to implement a Postman-Styled Smart Cell. As I made progress I realized that there’s a lot of potential in this tool for tighter integration with Elixir.

Merquery currently consists of 2 components:

• Merquery Smart Cell that provides an interactive way to work with HTTP requests, akin to Postman
• A mix task – mix merquery.generate – which introspects on your router and generates Merquery smart cells pre-filled with the information relevant to each route.

Merquery takes advantage of the Livebook ecosystem to have built in support for serialization and secret storage, so you can save queries for later usage and use keys from your Livebook Hub token vault.

It also can be used to generate source code just as all Smart Cells do. You can use Merquery as a learning tool to learn how to use Elixir HTTP clients.

The library is currently in its infancy, but below are some ideas I have going forward.

These are just some ideas for features I currently have, but are subject to change:

• Finish basic REST operations support
• Registering custom plugins
• Improve mix merquery.generate
  • Allow customized parameters for routes, etc.
  • Add Table of Contents at Top
• Migrate to TailwindCSS and distinctive design palette
• Req plugin discoverability - Host a location where Req plugins can be submitted for others to
  discover for use with Merquery
• Livebook routes instant deploy - Have a mix task (e.g. mix merquery.deploy) to automatically
  deploy the generated livebook from mix merquery.generate
• Support other HTTP clients and their unique features (HTTPoison, Tesla, etc. )
• Move Vue to Composition API and breakout components to SPCs

Any feedback is much appreciated!

• Repo: GitHub - acalejos/merquery: Interactive HTTP Client for Livebook w/ power-ups · GitHub
• Demos:
  • Generating Livebook from Phoenix Router
  • Interacting with Req Plugins
  • Manipulating Req Steps