User Auth System with Persistent Sessions using Phoenix, Pow, and Mnesia

A Lib Abandoned I have a web app built on Phoenix/Elixir that up until today used Coherence as its user authentication lib. Unfortunately the maintainer of this lib has straight ghosted, and so my options were fork Coherence and maintain it myself, build my own user auth system, or search out another lib. I did …

Automatically Restart Elixir Applications after Server Reboot with Edeliver/Distillery, Ubuntu, and Crontab

Edeliver is an awesome deployment tool for Elixir applications, including Phoenix apps, but one thing it lacks (intentionally) is support for auto-restarting your Elixir app after server reboots. Out of the box, if you want to restart your app after a server reboot, you can just run $ mix edeliver restart production in a terminal …

Setting up Phoenix Channels to use MessagePack for Serialization

In this article, I’ll show you how to setup your Phoenix 1.3 app to use the binary serialization format MessagePack for sending and receiving web socket channel messages. What is MessagePack? MessagePack is a binary serialization format. You know how JSON uses strings to represent different kinds of data and objects? Well MessagePack does the …