This release brings a number of exciting features, including integration with the new Phoenix LiveDashboard and Phoenix LiveView. There have been a few deprecations, but this ugprade should be quick and easy for most folks.
Phoenix LiveDashboard
On the heels of the official LiveDashboard release, Phoenix 1.5 projects now ship with LiveDashboard by default, for real-time performance monitoring and debugging tools. It’s at this point I also want to re-welome Michael Crumm to the phoenix-core team! He has been heading up the Dashboard work with José, and we can thank them both for the amazing results we have today.
The Dashboard brings you immediate insight into your Phoenix applications with focus on production data. Even if you are just starting with Phoenix, we have tooltips on the widgets so you can learn more about them and if/when you should worry about system limits and the health of your system. With telemetry integration, we also include charting of Phoenix events, along with user-defined metrics.
Check José’s twitter thread to see a breakdown of features and screenshots:
The dashboard also includes is also a streaming request logger. This is super convenient for diagnosing an issue in production where you need logs for specific requests but the regular logs drown out your requests in noise. With a button click, you can have all of your own request logs streamed to the dashboard instead of sifting thru a flood of production logs.
We also include a process tab, which is similar to observer, allowing you to sort processes in the system to find large message queues, memory hogs, etc.
Did we mention this Just Works™ for a cluster of distributed nodes? Using the node drop-down selector, you can access all the data/features listed above for any node on the cluster, regardless of what web node you happened to load-balance to when loading the dashboard.
Phoenix LiveView generators
The phx.new
project generator now includes a --live
flag to include everything you need to get up and running developing with LiveView. Additionally, we have also added a phx.gen.live
generator for boostrapping CRUD LiveView context/interfaces similar to phx.gen.html
. We recommend taking these generators for a test drive to see all the existing improvements to LiveView that recently shipped:
- Revamped LiveViewTest APIs for more powerful, workflow driven testing
- Deep diff tracking for LiveView templates, dramatically reducing server payloads in many cases
- Large performance improvements on client rendering
- Live Navigation with Live Flash
PubSub 2.0
Phoenix.PubSub 2.0 has been released with a more flexible and powerful fastlane mechanism. We took this opportunity to also move Phoenix.PubSub out of the endpoint and explicitly into your supervision tree. This prevents race conditions at startup and decouples your PubSub system from the endpoint. Follow the upgrade guides linked below to get up to speed.
Revamped Guides
Thanks to efforts by @josevalim, the Phoenix built-in guides have been restructured and revamped, providing a better navigation structure and more content. Be sure to take a look if you’d like to freshen up on your phoenix knowledge.
Other notable improvements include built-in support for MSSQL databases via the tds
adapter, and inclusion of the Phoenix.Ecto.CheckRepoStatus
plug in new projects to detect and prompt for database creation/migration on new requests.
As always, we have provided upgrade guides to bring your existing applications up to speed:
Find us on elixir slack/irc if you have questions. Happy coding!
–Chris
Full changelog:
1.5.0
Enhancements
- [Channel] Do not block the channel supervisor on join
- [ConnTest] Add
init_test_session
to Phoenix.ConnTest - [Controller] Support
:disposition
option insend_download/3
- [Endpoint] Allow named params to be used when defining socket paths
- [Endpoint] Raise if
force_ssl
has changed from compile time to runtime - [Generator] Add
mix phx.gen.live
for LiveView CRUD generation - [PubSub] Migrate to PubSub 2.0 with a more flexible fastlaning mechanism
- [View] Add
render_layout
which makes it easy to work with nested layouts - [Transport] Transports can now optionally implement
handle_control/2
for handling control frames such as:ping
and:pong
Deprecations
- [ChannelTest]
use Phoenix.ChannelTest
is deprecated in favor ofimport Phoenix.ChannelTest
- [ConnTest]
use Phoenix.ConnTest
is deprecated in favor ofimport Plug.Conn; import Phoenix.ConnTest
- [Endpoint] The outdated
Phoenix.Endpoint.CowboyAdapter
for Cowboy 1 is deprecated. Please make sure{:plug_cowboy, "~> 2.1"}
or later is listed in yourmix.exs
- [Endpoint]
subscribe
andunsubscribe
via the endpoint is deprecated, please usePhoenix.PubSub
directly instead - [Endpoint]
Phoenix.Endpoint.instrument/4
is deprecated and has no effect. Use:telemetry
instead. SeePhoenix.Logger
for more information - [Endpoint] The
:pubsub
key for endpoint is deprecated. Once you start your app, you will see step-by-step instructions on how to use the new PubSub config - [Layout] Use
<%= @inner_content %>
instead of<%= render @view_module, @view_template, assigns %>
for rendering the child layout
phx.new installer
- Built-in support for MSSQL databases via the
tds
adapter -
Phoenix.PubSub
is now started directly in your application supervision tree -
Phoenix.Ecto.CheckRepoStatus
is now added to new applications that use Ecto - Automatically use
System.get_env("MIX_TEST_PARTITION")
in the database name in the test environemnt for built-in CI test partitioning - Generate a
MyApp.Telemetry
module with examples of Telemetry Metrics you may want to track in your app - Support the
--live
flag for generating apps with out-of-the-box LiveView support
JavaScript client
- Ensure all channel event listeners are called
- Fix rejoining channels after explicit disconnect following be immediate reconnect
- Prevent duplicate join race conditions by immediately leaving duplicate channel on client