Ectogram: Setting Up Ecto

I am assuming if you are following along with this series that you have elixir, erlang, & psql installed on your machine. Please refer back to the intro post for the versions this post is following. With that let’s dive in!

Adding & Configuring Ecto

The first thing we will need to do is create an elixir project:

mix new ectogram --sup
cd ectogram

This is a template of an elixir project. It has no dependencies present at all so to work with Ecto we will need to install it using mix. First open your mix.exs file and add the following, then run the below command:

mix.exs

defp deps do
  [
    {:ecto_sql, "~> 3.0"},
    {:postgrex, ">= 0.0.0"}
  ]
end

Then we can install the dependencies by running:

mix deps.get

With Ecto installed we now have access to the Ecto command line tools that have been added to mix. To generate Ectogram’s Repo we will run:

mix ecto.gen.repo -r Ectogram.Repo

We will also create environment based configs that we will need later for testing:

touch config/{dev,test}.exs

Following the instructions output by the command we will update the application.ex and the config.exs:

lib/ectogram/application.ex

def start(_type, _args) do
    # ...
    children = [
      {Ectogram.Repo, []}
    ]
    # ...
end

config/config.exs

import Config
 
config :ectogram,
	ecto_repos: [Ectogram.Repo]
 
import_config "#{config_env()}.exs"

config/dev.exs

import Config
 
config :ectogram, Ectogram.Repo,
  database: "ectogram_dev",
  username: "postgres", # Make sure you change to credentials on your machine!
  password: "postgres", # Make sure you change to credentials on your machine!
  hostname: "localhost"

config/test.exs

import Config
 
config :ectogram, Ectogram.Repo,
  username: "postgres", # Make sure you change to credentials on your machine!
  password: "postgres", # Make sure you change to credentials on your machine!
  hostname: "localhost",
  database: "ectogram_test#{System.get_env("MIX_TEST_PARTITION")}",
  pool: Ecto.Adapters.SQL.Sandbox,
  pool_size: 10

One last thing we need to do before creating the Ectogram database is to update our mix.exs config to be able to reach for the correct environment config at runtime:

mix.exs

defmodule Ectogram.MixProject do
  use Mix.Project
 
  def project do
    [
      app: :ectogram,
      version: "0.1.0",
      elixir: "~> 1.13",
+     elixirc_paths: elixirc_paths(Mix.env()),
      start_permanent: Mix.env() == :prod,
      deps: deps()
    ]
  end
 
  # Run "mix help compile.app" to learn about applications.
  def application do
    [
      extra_applications: [:logger],
      mod: {Ectogram.Application, []}
    ]
  end
 
+ defp elixirc_paths(:test), do: ["lib", "test/support"]
+ defp elixirc_paths(_), do: ["lib"]
 
  # Run "mix help deps" to learn about dependencies.
  defp deps do
    [
      {:ecto_sql, "~> 3.0"},
      {:postgrex, ">= 0.0.0"}
    ]
  end
end

After making these configuration changes we can run the below to create the ectogram_dev database in Postgres.

mix ecto.create

And to verify that the database is infact on our machine we can run:

psql ectogram_dev
ectogram_dev=#

Customizing Ecto

There are some customizations I want to make before proceeding onward to creating tables and schemas. The following can be done on a table-by-table and schema-by-schema basis; however the changes I want to make I want applied across all tables and schemas so applying these at the top level of Ectogram’s configuration makes more sense. The first customization will be to change the defaults of Ecto.Migration. In our config.exs we will make another entry:

config/config.exs

import Config
 
+config :ectogram, Ectogram.Repo,
+  migration_foreign_key: [column: :id, type: :binary_id],
+  migration_primary_key: [name: :id, type: :binary_id],
+  migration_timestamps: [inserted_at: :created_at, type: :utc_datetime_usec, updated_at: :modified_at]
 
config :ectogram,
  ecto_repos: [Ectogram.Repo]
 
import_config "#{config_env()}.exs"

The above changes do the following when we run a migration:

All foreign keys by default are :bigserial and we are changing that to be :binary_id or UUIDs.
All primary keys are also by default :bigserial and again we are changing that to be in a UUID format.
We are renaming the default timestamps of inserted_at and updated_at to created_at and modified_at. Call me crazy I just like those better. The default type for timestamps is :naive_datetime and I prefer to set it to :utc_datetime_usec.

Next we will create a custom schema for Ectogram to override defaults of Ecto.Schema. This will make sure that our schema is inline with our tables so when we preform a changeset we don’t get told things like ”inserted_at does not exist did you mean created_at”.

touch /lib/ectogram/schema.ex

lib/ectogram/schema.ex

defmodule Ectogram.Schema do
  @moduledoc """
  Customizes the properties of Ecto.Schema.
 
  Now instead of:
    use Ecto.Schema
  do:
    use Ectogram.Schema
  """
  defmacro __using__(_) do
    quote do
      use Ecto.Schema
      @foreign_key_type :binary_id
      @primary_key {:id, :binary_id, autogenerate: true}
      @timestamps_opts [inserted_at: :created_at, type: :utc_datetime_usec, updated_at: :modified_at]
    end
  end
end

Prepping The Test Suite

mkdir test/support && touch test/support/data_case.ex

The Ectogram.DataCase is an ExUnit.CaseTemplate that we can use in our tests that essentially bootstrap the testing environment. In our case we need to have access to a database to run our tests so a sandbox is spun up. Every test will create a transaction and on the completion of that test the transaction will be rolled back automatically preventing their being stale data that could effect other tests. You can read more about it in the guide on Phoenix’s website.

test/support/data_case.ex

defmodule Ectogram.DataCase do
  use ExUnit.CaseTemplate
 
  using do
    quote do
      alias Ectogram.Repo
 
      import Ecto
      import Ecto.Changeset
      import Ecto.Query
      import Ectogram.DataCase
    end
  end
 
  setup tags do
    pid = Ecto.Adapters.SQL.Sandbox.start_owner!(Ectogram.Repo, shared: not tags[:async])
    on_exit(fn -> Ecto.Adapters.SQL.Sandbox.stop_owner(pid) end)
    :ok
  end
 
  def errors_on(changeset) do
    Ecto.Changeset.traverse_errors(changeset, fn {message, opts} ->
      Regex.replace(~r"%{(\w+)}", message, fn _, key ->
        opts |> Keyword.get(String.to_existing_atom(key), key) |> to_string()
      end)
    end)
  end
end

test/test_helper.exs

ExUnit.start()
+ Ecto.Adapters.SQL.Sandbox.mode(Ectogram.Repo, :manual)

Final Housekeeping

The last few things we will do before getting started is to add aliases to the project for faster command line magic, add a seeds.exs file for the future, and a super magical .iex.exs!

touch priv/repo/seeds.ex .iex.exs

The .iex.exs will be loaded by iex when we fire it up. This will make our lives easier later on when we are using iex because we can have our modules already aliased and ready to be accessed faster!

.iex.exs

alias Ectogram.{Repo}
 
import_if_available Ecto.Query
 
import_if_available Ecto.Changeset

And the final thing to do are to add some nice aliases for setting up and tearing down Ectogram’s database. You will notice their is even a call to the seeds.exs file we created. It won’t do anything yet, but in the next post we will begin adding seeds as we build out the data structures for the user.

mix.exs

defmodule Ectogram.MixProject do
  use Mix.Project
 
  def project do
    [
      app: :ectogram,
      version: "0.1.0",
      elixir: "~> 1.13",
      elixirc_paths: elixirc_paths(Mix.env()),
      start_permanent: Mix.env() == :prod,
-     deps: deps()
+     deps: deps(),
+     aliases: aliases()
    ]
  end
 
  # Run "mix help compile.app" to learn about applications.
  def application do
    [
      extra_applications: [:logger],
      mod: {Ectogram.Application, []}
    ]
  end
 
  defp elixirc_paths(:test), do: ["lib", "test/support"]
  defp elixirc_paths(_), do: ["lib"]
 
  # Run "mix help deps" to learn about dependencies.
  defp deps do
    [
      {:ecto_sql, "~> 3.0"},
      {:postgrex, ">= 0.0.0"}
    ]
  end
 
+ defp aliases do
+   [
+     setup: ["deps.get", "ecto.setup"],
+     "ecto.setup": ["ecto.create", "ecto.migrate", "run priv/repo/seeds.exs"],
+     "ecto.reset": ["ecto.drop", "ecto.setup"],
+     test: ["ecto.create --quiet", "ecto.migrate --quiet", "test"]
+   ]
+ end
end

And with that we are ready to forge ahead into building out the first data structure and table in Ectogram, our user! You can find all the code pertaining to this post in PR#1.

~ Cody 🚀

Adding & Configuring Ecto

Customizing Ecto

Prepping The Test Suite

Final Housekeeping

Related Articles

Ectogram: Testing Ecto

Ectogram: Generating The Users Table

Ectogram: Introduction