All my free time I’m spending on a my own project that I decided to write in Elixir, Rails and CoffeeScript. There is the service backend that runs heavily multi-threaded and so Elixir / Erlang was a natural choice.

I figure some of my friends might be interested in the tools I use currently, so here’s the short rundown:

Release management - exrm

Fantastic tool for building releases ready for the deployment. Prepares a versioned nicely packed archive with all dependencies and start / stop / restart / remote_console scripts.

JSON handling - jsex

Sweet little library for encoding, decoding and jumping through all sorts of hoops with JSON.

Websockets - sockjs-erlang

Although there’s great variety of web servers in Erlang Kingdom, I chose this one for my own needs for its simplicity. It sits on top of Cowboy and provides a very nice interface, so you focus on the task not on the Websocket handling chores.

UUID - uuid

Tiny library for all sorts of UUID generation.

HTTP client - httpoison

As with web servers, and basically everything else, there are plenty of options, but the one I stuck with is Httpoison. Being based on HTTPotion, it’s an excellent piece of software that makes running HTTP requests async or not a breeze.

These are basically the essentials I spent time finding. Hope it saves a bit of time for some of you.