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Elixir logo

CI

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications.

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

Policies

New releases are announced in the announcement mailing list. You can subscribe by sending an email to [email protected] and replying to the confirmation email.

All security releases will be tagged with [security]. For more information, please read our Security Policy.

All interactions in our official communication channels follow our Code of Conduct.

Bug reports

For reporting bugs, visit our issue tracker and follow the steps for reporting a new issue. Please disclose security vulnerabilities privately at [email protected].

Issues tracker management

All currently open bugs related to the Elixir repository are listed in the issues tracker. The Elixir team uses the issues tracker to focus on actionable items, including planned enhancements in the short and medium term. We also do our best to label entries for clarity and to ease collaboration.

Our actionable item policy has some important consequences, such as:

  • Proposing new features as well as requests for support, help, and guidance must be done in their own spaces, detailed next.

  • Issues we have identified to be outside of Elixir's scope, such as an upstream bug, will be closed (and requested to be moved elsewhere if appropriate).

  • We actively close unrelated and non-actionable issues to keep the issues tracker tidy. We may get things wrong from time to time and will gladly revisit issues, reopening when necessary.

Keep the tone positive and be kind! For more information, see the Code of Conduct.

Proposing new features

For proposing new features, please start a discussion in the Elixir Core mailing list. The language development history and its focus are described on our website.

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. A good proposal includes the problem description and how the proposed solution compares with existing alternatives in the Elixir ecosystem (as well as in other languages). To iron out a proposal before submission, consider using and gathering feedback from the community spaces listed on the sidebar of the Elixir website.

Once a proposal is accepted, it will be added to the issue tracker. Features and bug fixes that have already been merged and will be included in the next release are then "closed" and added to the changelog.

Discussions, support, and help

For general discussions, support, and help, please use the community spaces listed on the sidebar of the Elixir website, such as forums, chat platforms, etc, where the wider community will be available to help you.

Compiling from source

For the many different ways to install Elixir, see our installation instructions on the website. However, if you want to contribute to Elixir, you will need to compile from source.

First, install Erlang. After that, clone this repository to your machine, compile and test it:

git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir.git
cd elixir
make

Note: if you are running on Windows, this article includes important notes for compiling Elixir from source on Windows.

In case you want to use this Elixir version as your system version, you need to add the bin directory to your PATH environment variable.

When updating the repository, you may want to run make clean before recompiling. For deterministic builds, you should set the environment variable ERL_COMPILER_OPTIONS=deterministic.

Contributing

We invite contributions to Elixir. To contribute, there are a few things you need to know about the code. First, Elixir code is divided by each application inside the lib folder:

  • elixir - Elixir's kernel and standard library

  • eex - EEx is the template engine that allows you to embed Elixir

  • ex_unit - ExUnit is a simple test framework that ships with Elixir

  • iex - IEx stands for Interactive Elixir: Elixir's interactive shell

  • logger - Logger is the built-in logger

  • mix - Mix is Elixir's build tool

You can run all tests in the root directory with make test. You can also run tests for a specific framework with make test_#{APPLICATION}, for example, make test_ex_unit. If you just changed something in Elixir's standard library, you can run only that portion through make test_stdlib.

If you are only changing one file, you can choose to compile and run tests for that specific file for faster 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

Some test files need their test_helper.exs to be explicitly required before, such as:

bin/elixir -r lib/logger/test/test_helper.exs lib/logger/test/logger_test.exs

You can also use the LINE env var to run a single test:

LINE=123 bin/elixir lib/elixir/test/elixir/string_test.exs

To recompile all (including Erlang modules):

make compile

After your changes are done, please remember to run make format to guarantee all files are properly formatted, then run the full suite with make test.

If your contribution fails during the bootstrapping of the language, you can rebuild the language from scratch with:

make clean_elixir compile

Similarly, if you can not get Elixir to compile or the tests to pass after updating an existing checkout, run make clean compile. You can check the official build status. More tasks can be found by reading the Makefile.

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:

Reviewing changes

Once a pull request is sent, the Elixir team will review your changes. We outline our process below to clarify the roles of everyone involved.

All pull requests must be approved by two committers before being merged into the repository. If changes are necessary, the team will leave appropriate comments requesting changes to the code. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee a pull request will be merged, even when modifications are requested, as the Elixir team will re-evaluate the contribution as it changes.

Committers may also push style changes directly to your branch. If you would rather manage all changes yourself, you can disable the "Allow edits from maintainers" feature when submitting your pull request.

The Elixir team may optionally assign someone to review a pull request. If someone is assigned, they must explicitly approve the code before another team member can merge it.

When the review finishes, your pull request will be squashed and merged into the repository. If you have carefully organized your commits and believe they should be merged without squashing, please mention it in a comment.

Building documentation

Building the documentation requires that ExDoc is installed and built alongside Elixir:

# After cloning and compiling Elixir, in its parent directory:
git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/ex_doc.git
cd ex_doc && ../elixir/bin/elixir ../elixir/bin/mix do deps.get + compile

Now go back to Elixir's root directory and run:

make docs                  # to generate HTML pages
make docs DOCS_FORMAT=epub # to generate EPUB documents

This will produce documentation sets for elixir, eex, ex_unit, iex, logger, and mix under the doc directory. If you are planning to contribute documentation, please check our best practices for writing documentation.

Development links

License

"Elixir" and the Elixir logo are registered trademarks of The Elixir Team.

Elixir source code is released under Apache License 2.0.

Check NOTICE and LICENSE files for more information.