Phoenix equivalent of Django's reusable apps (best practices)?

Hi folks,

I come from a mostly Python+Django background, and I’ve only played with Elixir+Phoenix a little on personal side projects. Phoenix is really appealing to me because it addresses a lot of the things that have pained me when working on large Django projects. There are some things I miss of course, like the Django admin and more straightforward auth story, but I’m happy to make that tradeoff.

But the one thing that is really important to me that I don’t know how to do in Phoenix is to create reusable apps: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/intro/reusable-apps/

In Django, you can create apps that have their own bundled resources, and import those apps into different projects. So there might be a wiki Django app (there are actually probably a hundred), and if I pip install it into my Python environment, I can then add that Django app to the list of installed apps in my Django project, hook it up with a base URL, and now I have an app that I didn’t write.

Sometimes I want to create apps that have small bits of relatively self contained functionality (like that wiki). Sometimes I want to create a whole set of apps that are meant to go together, but might plausibly be extended – say a learning management system that’s open to minor extensions, because Site A might want to add some new model that has a foreign key relation to Students.

I have no doubt that something like this is possible in Phoenix, but what are the best practices for doing so? Are there any particularly stand-out examples I should look at?

Thank you.

Dave

3 Likes

Hey ormsbee,

good to have you aboard! :slight_smile:

While I am not the most qualified to answer you architectural questions in depth, I think elixir provides multiple abstractions for what you want to achieve. The most straight forward way would be to use an umbrella application. An umbrella is essentially a mono repo for multiple elixir applications with a shared dependency folder. As far as I know it is not a 1:1 mapping for Django’s app concept, but it is actually pretty good and easy enough to understand. It also creates great encapsulation.

As per your remark regarding more straightforward auth story: this was hands down my biggest gripe with Phoenix until I discovered GitHub - pow-auth/pow: Robust, modular, and extendable user authentication system - just give it a try. I think it is fantastic! :slight_smile:

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You may have noticed that the phoenix router and request pipeline is based on Plug — Plug v1.15.2. As you might have guessed from it’s name that API is very pluggable :slight_smile: It’s possible to mount plugs in the phoenix router for instance like this

defmodule MyProject.Router do
  use MyProject.Web, :router
  use ExAdmin.Router
  ...
  scope "/", MyProject do
    ...
  end

  # setup the ExAdmin routes on /admin
  scope "/admin", ExAdmin do
    pipe_through :browser
    admin_routes()
  end

This will mount the ExAdmin app/plug routes under /admin. (see GitHub - smpallen99/ex_admin: ExAdmin is an auto administration package for Elixir and the Phoenix Framework for more about the library)

If you dig a bit you’ll see that the plug API is very small. Elixir being a functional language the abstractions tend to be far simpler than OO languages as the functional abstractions in the language do a lot of the work for you.

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Another example of adding self contained functionality to an existing Phoenix app is exq_ui

In that example the forward/4 function mounts one router plug at a path within the main app router.

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Thanks folks. I’ll read through the links you posted. I was aware of Plug, but I’m not sure I really grok it. My Python mental mapping of Plug is “WSGI/ASGI”, which is integration at a lower level than I was thinking of. But you folks have given me a great set of starting points, and certainly enough for me to try things out and see what roadblocks I run into next.

Take care.

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Mix is your tool. Mix dependencies are just elixir apps.

The mix.exs is where you can include your reusable “apps” along with other dependencies. You do not have to pull a dependency from hex. You can write your own reusable elixir apps and include it with git or even a file system path.

To make a reusable app you can do mix new reusable_app (outside of an existing app) then include it in your main app’s mix.exs.

# published to hex.pm
{:reusable_app, ">= 0.4.0"}
# git
{:reusable_app, git: "https://github.com/oremsbee/reusable_app.git"}
# local
{:reusable_app, path: "path/to/local/reusable_app"}

The other posts have pointed out good examples of mounting routes. Overall the process is not much different between the two. Just different build tools and package managers.

Reference
https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Deps.html
https://hex.pm/docs/usage

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