In my first blog of this series, I wrote about what is needed to start an Elixir project. In this blog, we will discuss what is needed to start a Phoenix application.

What is Phoenix?

Phoenix is a web development framework written in Elixir that implements the server-side Model View Controller(MVC) pattern.

To have a Phoenix application up and running, we will need to have the following installed:

• the Elixir programming language, check Elixir 101 on how to install it.

• a database - eg PostgreSQL

Once you have those setup, you will need to install the Phoenix application generator using the following command:

mix archive.install hex phx_new

Bootstrapping a Phoenix application

From your preferred directory, run the following command to start a new Phoenix application hello

mix phx.new hello

the Phoenix application generator generates the directory structure and all the files we will need for our application. Accept with Y when prompted to install dependencies

Once done, move into your application directory by running:

cd hello

Now we will create our database by running:

mix ecto.create

to start the server run:

mix phx.server

the above command starts our server on port 4000 by default, to view go to http://localhost:4000