For more about Elixir, installation and documentation, check Elixir's website.
To run Elixir from source, clone this repository to your machine, compile and test it:
git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir.git
cd elixir
make clean test
Note: if you are running on Windows, this article includes important notes for compiling Elixir from source on Windows.
If Elixir fails to build (specifically when pulling in a new version via
git
), be sure to remove any previous build artifacts by running
make clean
, then make test
.
If tests pass, you are ready to move on to the
Getting Started guide or to try Interactive Elixir by running:
bin/iex
in your terminal.
However, if tests fail, it is likely you have an outdated Erlang version
(Elixir requires Erlang 18.0 or later). You can check your Erlang version
by calling erl
in the command line. You will see some information as follows:
Erlang/OTP 18 [erts-7.0] [source] [smp:2:2] [async-threads:10] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]
If you have properly set up your dependencies and tests still fail, you may want to open up a bug report, as explained next.
For reporting bugs, visit our issues tracker and follow the steps for reporting a new issue. Security vulnerabilities must be privately disclosed at [email protected].
We welcome everyone to contribute to Elixir and help us tackle existing issues!
To do so, there are a few things you need to know about the code. First, Elixir
code is divided in applications inside the lib
folder:
-
elixir
- Contains Elixir's kernel and stdlib -
eex
- Template engine that allows you to embed Elixir -
ex_unit
- Simple test framework that ships with Elixir -
iex
- IEx, Elixir's interactive shell -
logger
- The built-in logger -
mix
- Elixir's build tool
You can run all tests in the root directory with make test
and you can
also run tests for a specific framework make test_#{NAME}
, for example,
make test_ex_unit
.
In case you are changing a single file, you can compile and run tests only for that particular file for fast development cycles. For example, if you are changing the String module, you can compile it and run its tests as:
bin/elixirc lib/elixir/lib/string.ex -o lib/elixir/ebin
bin/elixir lib/elixir/test/elixir/string_test.exs
After your changes are done, please remember to run the full suite with
make test
.
From time to time, your tests may fail in an existing Elixir checkout and
may require a clean start by running make clean compile
. You can always
check the official build status on Travis-CI.
With tests running and passing, you are ready to contribute to Elixir and send a pull request. We have saved some excellent pull requests we have received in the past in case you are looking for some examples:
- Implement Enum.member? – Pull Request
- Add String.valid? – Pull Request
- Implement capture_io for ExUnit – Pull Request
We usually keep a list of enhancements and bugs in the issue tracker. For proposing new features, please start a discussion in the Elixir Core mailing list. Keep in mind that it is your responsibility to argue and explain why a feature is useful and how it will impact the codebase and the community. Finally, remember all interactions in our official spaces follow our Code of Conduct.
Building the documentation requires ExDoc to be installed and built alongside Elixir:
# After cloning and compiling Elixir, in its parent directory:
git clone git://github.com/elixir-lang/ex_doc.git
cd ex_doc && ../elixir/bin/mix do deps.get, compile
cd ../elixir && make docs
This will produce documentation sets for elixir
, mix
, etc., under
the doc
directory. If you are planning to contribute documentation,
please check our best practices for writing documentation.
- Elixir Website
- Elixir Documentation
- Elixir Core Mailing list (development)
- Issues tracker
- Code of Conduct
- #elixir-lang on Freenode IRC
"Elixir" and the Elixir logo are copyright (c) 2012 Plataformatec.
Elixir source code is released under Apache 2 License.