Recompile and restart applications from the outside?

When I run a phoenix app that I want to debug, I start it with

$ iex -S mix phx.server

Just adapt with your own command. Then the recompile command is available…

iex> recompile()

In Phoenix, there is a live websocket reload mecanism in dev mode, but I don’t know about your usage.

I should add that the application is currently started via “mix run --no-halt”, which is executed each time the container is started.

I’ve come up with what I think is the perfect solution now: If I name the elixir node when starting it via mix run, I can then remote shell into it with iex and recompile it, and then it works. That should be the fastest way for sure. Here’s the commands for anyone that comes across this problem later:

Start a named elixir node: elixir --sname <node name> -S mix run --no-halt
Remote shell with iex: iex --remsh <name@host> --sname <just make up a name>

Indeed you can remotely connect to the shell and once there you can use the recompile command to recompile your code. But how will you restart it after?

A way of doing it is to restart BEAM. You can do this by typing :init.restart. It returns :ok and proceeds to restart all applications smoothly:

Notice however, that doing so will kick out of your IEX session after

Hope it helps!

Thanks! As it turned out, a restart wasn’t actually needed in my case but still, it’s good to know.