Programming in Elixir with Docker on Windows

If I am using windows, I use WSL2. With this i can treat it as any other Linux machine. You do not need to use docker, but If you did, it has nice integration with WSL.

In WSL, I use asdf for elixir/erlang/nodejs

This is also the best advice I can give as a Windows user.

I’ve been using WSL for the past 2 years with Elixir and the overall experience has been pretty good (especially after some WSL2 tweaks).

You shouldn’t compound one unknown with yet another one. Learn Elixir, don’t learn Elixir and Docker at the same time.

I’m using Windows 10 to write Elixir – but I use a Linux Mint virtual machine and actually code in there. I recommend you go that route.

https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/downloads/info/slug/desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_workstation_player/16_0

My main current machine runs Windows 10, and having come to it from Linux (Fedora) I’ll attest to WSL2 working remarkably well. I brought my Linux dotfiles along (making a few wsl-specific edits here and there), and I have an environment that feels pretty comfortable. Windows terminal is finally good enough to live in. From day to day I hardly notice that I’m effectively working in a VM. Performance is impressive - within a few percent of running Linux on bare metal. You can even use your GPU from WSL (though until the final WSLg release it involves running a Windows Insider build, so probably better to wait a few months for that).

Agree that adding the burden of learning Docker seems like an unnecessary barrier.

You can also develop on Windows without using WSL.

Went that route before and can’t quite recommend that. The “elixir experience” on pure Windows can become quite frustrating sometimes although it might have changed since the last time I used it. One of the things that ground my gears back then was that IEx autocompletion simply didn’t work (and werl is just not really a good alternative to a terminal workflow. Besides, it is ugly AF)

You are better off just using WSL2 with whatever distro you like best. It’s just easier to set up and you won’t have problems with libraries where UNIX support is first class. Just less headache overall.

IEx autocompletion, no asdf and sometimes symbols/colours in the terminal are weird are what I notice is lacking, but I figure typing everything means I commit things to memory better.

My app is designed to run on Windows only and interacts with other Windows software through a dll, so I don’t have a choice

Thanks for all replies!

I made a small research about Docker and it seems to work a little bit different than I thought. I just set up WSL2 with Ubuntu and installed elixir (sudo apt install erlang elixir), but I have some troubles with ElixirLS.

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Install elixir and erlang with asdf or using the instructions from Installing Elixir - The Elixir programming language, the versions available on the default repos for ubuntu 20.04 (which is the most common in WSL2) aren’t that updated.

IIRC the default elixir version in the ubuntu repos is 1.9 and elixir-ls depends on 1.10.

Thanks, I updated elixir to 1.12, but I still get error ‘server crashed 5 times in the last 3 minutes’, no matter if I try in WSL Remote or not.