For more about Elixir, installation and documentation, check Elixir's website.

Usage

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However, if tests fail, it is likely you have an outdated Erlang version (Elixir requires Erlang 18.0 or later).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 the correct version and tests still fail, please open an issue.

Contributing

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 a new feature, 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 documentation

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.

Development links

• Elixir Website
• Elixir Documentation
• Elixir Core Mailing list (development)
• Issues tracker
• Code of Conduct
• #elixir-lang on Freenode IRC

License

"Elixir" and the Elixir logo are copyright (c) 2012 Plataformatec.

Elixir source code is released under Apache 2 License.

Check NOTICE and LICENSE files for more information.