Hi everyone,
I’m reaching out today for some guidance on setting up an Elixir development environment with an effective linter. I’m a university student trying out my hand on a side project that involves full-stack development, and I was particularly interested in exploring Elixir due to its potential for high concurrency, GraphQL subscriptions through Absinthe, and a light introduction to functional programming.
Initially, I was drawn to the Phoenix framework with its channel support for websockets and Absinthe for GraphQL. However, I’ve encountered some challenges in setting up the environment and getting started with Absinthe subscriptions.
Here’s what I’ve tried so far:
- IDEs: Since I’m a JetBrains IDE user, I initially looked for a linter but the biggest elixir linter people suggested didnt (to my knowledge still doesnt) have support for the 2024 versions of the ides.
- VS Code: I switched to VS Code with the Elixir Language Server extension. However, it warned me about potential bugs with Erlang 26 on Windows, and subsequent troubleshooting attempts weren’t successful.
- Dev Containers: I explored using Dev Containers with GitHub Codespaces, but unfortunately, encountered different but similar issues (something about the elixir command not being found) which I also failed to debug
- WSL Setup: Finally, I managed to set up a development environment within WSL, and while the linter seems to work for basic syntax errors, it doesn’t provide more comprehensive assistance like reference checking for non-existent modules or function signature validation. This lack of advanced features significantly impacts development speed for a newcomer to the language (i was also concernend to see code compiling just fine while referencing modules that dont exist, not sure if thats a quirk of the launguage).
- Absinthe Subscriptions: Additionally, I struggled to achieve a minimum working example of Absinthe subscriptions using the provided documentation with the GitHub repository demo seeming dated (7 years), I understand that tutorials might also require some updates.
I understand that there might be a learning curve involved, and I’m more than willing to put in the work. However, I’ve never encountered such a frustrating setup process with any other development environment or launguage, i may be spoiled but i am used to this kind of tooling just working.
Truth is I am convinced it’s my fault, it just has to be since everything I’ve heard is about how newbie friendly and productive elixir is and how good the developer experience is and i genuinely wish someone is able to show me what horrible mistake I’ve made to go from that to this
My Questions:
- Would anyone be willing to share their Elixir development environment setup that offers as much tooling as possible and how to set it up?
- Are there any up to date resources or tutorials demonstrating how to implement Absinthe subscriptions or a working demo of some kind i can pick apart?
Any guidance or insights you can provide would be tremendously helpful because I am genuinely out of ideas!
Thank you,
