paulstatezny
Uniform - Less boilerplate, more code reuse in your portfolio of Elixir apps
Announcing Uniform.
Uniform tries to minimize the work required to maintain a large portfolio of Elixir apps. It does this via centralization and automation.
How it works
Uniform works best when you have a portfolio of apps whose core is very similar. (For example, a suite of Phoenix LiveView apps that all use TailwindCSS.)
Here’s how it works:
- You build your entire portfolio of apps in a single, “vanilla” Elixir app. (No “umbrella” or “poncho” setup.) You can generate this “Base Project” with
mix new,mix phx.new, etc. - You use Uniform’s “blueprint” DSL to set up “base files” and mix dependencies that are required for every app.
- You “eject” each app into its own completely separate codebase using
mix uniform.eject. The ejected codebase contains the exact project structure you need, with only the code relevant to that app. - You deploy each app using these ejected codebases.
- (Recommended) You automate updating ejected codebases via CI, (with
mix uniform.eject) so that they basically “update themselves”.
The sales pitch
When you embrace the Uniform approach, it can feel a bit like magic.
- Security defect in all 10 of the apps you maintain? Fix it in your Base Project and
poof – it’s fixed everywhere. - Need to quickly prototype a new app?
mix uniform.gen.app my_appand you’re off to the races. No need to set up your suite of common tools for the umpteenth time. (Re-running generators, adding configuration, etc.) - Have a private library in one app that you want to use in another? Modify a couple lines of Uniform configuration and it’s instantly available.
- Want to update some Hex deps across a dozen apps? Update them in your Base Project and they’re updated everywhere.
Uniform tries to lower the amount of effort required for developers to get stuff done. It automates away the manual work needed to keep your codebases “uniform” – in total sync. (But only in the ways you prefer them to be.)
Request for feedback
We know this approach is unconventional to say the least. But we’ve been quietly iterating on it, and it’s working pretty well for us!
We’re very curious what the community at large thinks about this approach.
Links
Click here for the docs and guides.
The code snippets in the Setting up a Phoenix project guide show what it looks like to configure Uniform for a “real” project.
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halostatue
This looks really useful, and might be interesting to adapt to make it easier to eject into umbrella apps (one of the systems that I’m working on has client-specific modules).
If I might suggest, an example ejectable repo would be useful to better understand how Uniform works, though.
paulstatezny
@halostatue (and anyone else!) I added an example Uniform project on GitHub.
It’s quite barebones; the example apps are just facades. But it does include the basic structure of setting up Uniform for Phoenix apps. Over time we’ll need to add more to highlight the different features of Uniform.
You can see the codebases that are ejected from the base project here:
paulstatezny
@halostatue That sounds like it fits perfectly into Uniform’s model.
Are you currently using private Hex packages for that shared code? Copy-pasting it across codebases? Something else?
Feel free to hit me up on Elixir Slack (@paulstatezny) if you want to talk about specifics that you’re not comfortable sharing here. I’d be happy to walk you through a potential setup that fits your needs.
halostatue
The current code is…ad hoc and within the umbrella right now. What we’d be looking at retrofitting with Umbrella would be the management of those adapter submodules. I’m thinking we‘d have apps/adapter_template and then somehow do mix uniform.eject --umbrella to know it would be ejecting into the umbrella rather than to a new repo / package. There’s some other bits that would be good (and maybe Uniform could detect).
As I said, though, I’m not even quite sure what it is that we want, and we’ve got a few other overdue upgrade tasks that we’re working through now so we probably won’t be looking at this for a few weeks.
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