Provided by: elixir_1.3.3-2_all 
NAME
mix — The software project management tool
SYNOPSIS
mix [TASK] [project_name]
elixir [OPTIONS] -S mix [TASK] [project_name]
DESCRIPTION
mix is intended for both organizing code into projects and their maintenance. For the latter the tool
offers some advanced features like dependency management, packaging, preparing documentation, testing and
so on.
Have a look at the SYNOPSIS section and the second way of running mix it offers. The point is that the tool
is none other than the Elixir script, therefore it can be invoked via elixir(1) in the same way as any
other script. It's useful when you want to run mix with particular options.
DEFINITIONS
All the mix functionality is represented by a set of tasks. A task is a piece of code written in Elixir and
intended for solving a particular problem. Like programs, many tasks accept input parameters and/or support
options which slightly modify their behaviour, but others do not. There are two types of tasks: those that
are available after installation this or that archive (local tasks) and those that are offered by mix
(built-in tasks). The run task will be executed by default if none other has been specified.
In spite of the fact that the greater part of mix is tasks, the man page doesn't contain the help
information related to each of them because mix is self-descriptive. Thus, using the help task, you can get
both the full list of local/built-in tasks and the information related to a particular task.
An archive, in terms of Erlang, is the ZIP file with the .ez extension which contains a precompiled Erlang
application with all its dependencies[1].
An application is an entity that helps to combine sets of components into a single unit to simplify their
reusing in other systems[2].
ENVIRONMENT
MIX_ARCHIVES
Allows specifying the directory into which the archives should be installed (see mix help
archive.install). The ~/.mix/archives directory is used for this purpose by default.
MIX_DEBUG
When set, outputs debug information about each task before running it.
MIX_ENV
Allows specifying which environment should be used. The dev environment is used by default if none
other has been specified.
Sometimes you have to use a particular set of configuration parameter values or perform particular
steps when you compile or run a project (or in some other cases). The mix environments allow
grouping values of configuration parameters and steps to switch between them by specifying the
necessary environment via MIX_ENV.
MIX_EXS
Allows changing the full path to the mix.exs file (see FILES section). The most obvious use case
is to have more than one copy of mix.exs in a project, but it's worth noting that MIX_EXS should be
used only if the mix environments (see above) are not enough to solve the problem.
MIX_HOME
Stores configuration files and scripts shared by multiple mix implementations.
See the Mix.Utils.mix_home/0 function.
MIX_PATH
Allows expanding the code path. If the MIX_PATH environment variable has a value which consists of
multiple paths, they must be colon-separated (for Unix-like operating systems) or semicolon-
separated (for Windows).
As has already been mentioned above, there are two types of tasks: local and built-in. These tasks
are always visible for mix because the directories, in which they are located, are a part of code
path. If a task belongs to neither the one type nor the other, MIX_PATH helps you say to mix where
it should search the task.
Use the :code.get_path/0 function to get the list of paths which are a part of the code path by
default and the Mix.Utils.mix_paths/0 function to get the list of paths specified in the MIX_PATH
value.
MIX_QUIET
When set, does not print information messages to the terminal.
FILES
mix.exs
Contains the most significant information related to the project, such as its name, version, list
of dependencies and so on. As a rule, the file is named mix.exs and located at the top of the
project's source tree, but you can change the full path to it using the MIX_EXS environment
variable (see the ENVIRONMENT section).
mix.lock
Allows locking down the project dependencies with a proper version range before performing any
updates. It is useful when you know that your project is incompatible with newer versions of
certain dependencies. The file is located at the top of the project's source tree as well as
mix.exs (see above).
REFERENCES
[1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/code.html#id103620 [2] http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/applications.html
SEE ALSO
elixir(1), elixirc(1), iex(1)
AUTHOR
This manual page contributed by Evgeny Golyshev.
INTERNET RESOURCES
Main website: http://elixir-lang.org Documentation: http://elixir-lang.org/docs.html General Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/group/elixir-lang-talk Development Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/group/elixir-lang-core