believe it’s a feature that it locks…

you can use mix deps.update my_dependency

Correct, it’s to prevent it from, say, randomly breaking when it was just working from build to build.

Aliasing certain mix tasks might work without having to write a shell script.

use the :branch option.

Edit: Actually i"m not 100% sure this doesn’t cache a lock at get-time. If it does, you can always mix deps.update

As far as I know there’s no way to accomplish this directly. I’d probably either:

1. Add a deps_get.sh script that ran mix deps.get; mix deps.update grpc_dep
2. Use a path dependency in development and add a ci task to check that the version of the grpc_dep in the lock file is the most recent version
   a. Note that this requires you to have a separate local checkout of the dependency

Alternatively you could forgo a mix.lock file completely (by constantly deleting it) but I wouldn’t advise you to take that approach.