Simpler Elixir Travis Configuration

I’ve been playing around with building simple Phoenix framework sites using Elixir lately. It’s been a lot of fun really digging in and figuring out my own best practices as I go along. One of the obvious ones is setting things up so that all my tests can be run on Travis. I found an article that described how to configure one’s Phoenix project for Travis. But there was a part that always bugged me about it.

First, a bit about how Elixir applications work. It is common for Elixir applications to have a series of one or more configuration files. config.exs contains the default or global configuration. Optionally, there are three other configuration override files each for dev, test, and prod environments named dev.exs, test.exs, and prod.exs respectively. They override any defaults from config.exs in their respective environments. They do this by importing the environment-specific configuration into the global one (see the import_config line):

which I think is a pretty cool system.

The part that bugged me about the article I linked above is that the standard Phoenix test.exs configuration is:

We need to modify only one line of this configuration in order to make it work on Travis, line 16. If we set the database password to empty, it’s all good. What the article suggests is to create a separate travis.exs configuration that has all of the same information in it as test.exs with that one line changed. As someone who spent a number of years working in QA, this kind of duplication is a big red flag! Now if any line other than line 16 changes in test.exs, we have to remember to change it in travis.exs also. And we have to remember that line 16 is the “special” line that should be different 😱

We already have a mechanism for overriding configuration values though, the same one we use in config.exs in every Phoenix application. So in my latest project, I rewrote my test.exs with line 22 added:

This added line checks to see if it is being run in a CI environment, like Travis, and imports the ci.exs configuration file:

which overrides the one setting that we want changed. Additionally, if I later choose to have multiple CI environments for any reason, I can further extend this pattern to customize for Travis versus CircleCI or AppVeyor.

Elixir’s ability to create domain-specific languages like the configuration language we see here is similar to Ruby’s and it is one of the main reasons I really enjoy both languages. Being able to easily call standard Elixir code in the middle of what would typically be a simple data file is what separates a DSL like Mix.Config from JSON or YAML. Leveraging that ability can save us a lot of heartache and manual labor in the long run.


        

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