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Get up and running with Phoenix on Windows

Ryan Schuetzler

• 2 min read

While it's possible to use Elixir and Phoenix entirely from within your normal Windows environment, there are some dependencies of Phoenix that are... challenging to install. So I recommend installing it within WSL instead.

Prerequisites

  • A database (I like Postgres)

Get Elixir installed

WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is a way to run a Linux machine inside your Windows using built-in features. It's super nice to have, and gets you access to all kinds of Linux-y things.

  1. Follow the Microsoft instructions for installing WSL.
  2. Run the following commands to install Erlang and Elixir in your WSL environment. We add a new repository from RabbitMQ because the default packages are pretty outdated.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rabbitmq/rabbitmq-erlang
sudo apt update
sudo apt install git elixir erlang

Get your project set up

Choose the appropriate option below depending on if you are starting from scratch or working on an existing project.

Option 1: Starting a new project

From the Powershell prompt, run the following command to install the Phoenix project creation tool:

mix archive.install hex phx_new

Then you can run the following command to create a new project. You can replace "hello" with whatever you want your project and directory to be called. This will create a new directory named hello. During the install, it will ask if you want to install dependencies. Say y to that, or you can always install them later with mix deps.get.

mix phx.new hello

Option 2: Working on an existing project

Navigate to the project directory and run the following command. If it asks about installing hex, just say yes.

mix setup

Local project setup

Now we need to hook up the database so we can start the project. I like to use VS Code to work on my WSL projects, and you can open it in the project directory by navigating into the directory and typing code . This opens a VS code window with your project.

Set up your database connection information in the <project>/config/dev.exs file. That should contain the username, password, hostname, and database name of your development database. Once you do that, run the following two commands to get your database set up:

mix ecto.create
mix ecto.migrate

After the database is ready to go, you should be ready to run the application. 

mix phx.server

Then navigate to http://localhost:4000 in your browser to see the page

(Optional) VS Code Setup

There's a couple useful extensions for VS Code that make Elixir and Phoenix projects a bit easier