Using project's .iex.exs with gigalixir ps:remote_console

You can do this:

This is a perfect workaround for my use case but I cannot mark it “solution” unless we are sure there is no way to use the project iex.exs in gigalixir remote_console.

Thanks very much for this simple brilliant idea.

Afaik releases don’t work with .iex.exs, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

I noticed than when building the release locally and connecting to it, it works:

myapp$ cat .iex.exs
IO.puts "it works"

# terminal 1
myapp$ _build/dev/rel/myapp/bin/myapp start

# terminal 2
myapp$ _build/dev/rel/myapp/bin/myapp remote
it works

However, if I start the release from another directory, it doesn’t work:

# terminal 1
_build/dev/rel/myapp$ bin/myapp start

# terminal 2
myapp$ _build/dev/rel/myapp/bin/myapp remote
(no output)

It seems it’s a matter of where you start your release from and whether that
directory contains the .iex.exs file and so you could change your :releases
Mix configuration to copy the file into appropriate location.

I did notice one thing that while executing code or setting up aliases in the
.iex.exs file work, autocomplete of these aliases does not so it’s seems
it’s not fully supported.

Aha, that’s my problem. I was doing it with a monorepo where the .iex.exs was in a subdirectory. Thanks!

Sounds like one could create a release step bundling a local .iex.exs like config/releases.exs and editing remote_console, so it automatically loads from there.

What do you mean by “editing remote_console”?

Modifying this part in the created binary you call with bin/myapp remote, so it automatically loads the .iex.exs from wherever it is stored.

https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/mix/lib/mix/tasks/release.init.ex#L198-L205

OK so I moved from doing Mix releases to doing Elixir releases with clustering and I discovered that the .iex.exs simply is nowhere on the deployed instance:

connect to instance:

gigalixir ps:remote_console

search for .iex.exs:

System.cmd("find", ["/", "-name", ".iex.exs"]) 

returns:

{"", 0} 

so I guess the release doesn’t include the .iex.exs. I am starting to understand more now.

I have no idea how to do this with a gigalixir release.