How do I load an Elixir library into iex without adding it to a project's mix.exs deps?

Question

I want to tryout the Poison json module without creating a mix project.

How do I install it and make it available in iex via import?

I have been able to add it

Answer 1

I can recommend you this blog post.

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1st Step: What do you want?

There's more than a couple of libraries I want to use without a Mix project, like

• Combine
• CSV
• Poison

Get their sources from Github, git checkout to the last release and compile them.

2nd Step: Where do you want them?

One compilation was over, create ~/.mix/beam/ and move the .beam files into this directory.

3rd Step: Now let's customize your Interactive EliXir shell!

Thankfully, iex is just a shell script. If you happen to have a custom $PATH variable that points to ~/.local/bin, then copy iex to this directory and rename it to something like deviex. Then in your custom deviex, move to the last line and change it to…

exec elixir --no-halt --erl "-user Elixir.IEx.CLI" -pa "$HOME/.mix/beam" +iex "$@"

And now it will load the .beam files located at ~/.mix/beam at startup.

The reason why we use a different script for IEx is to avoid name conflicts with installed libs in the projects you'll work on with regular iex.