Add utility functions to iex

Elixir has some useful utility functions available in iex like h/1 which prints documentation on the given module or function/arity pair.

You can add your own utility functions or macros by defining a utility module and then importing it into your .iex file.

Example

defmodule MyApp.IexUtilities do
  def u(id_or_username) do
    MyApp.Users.find_user(id_or_username)
  end
end

Import your utility module in your .iex file in the project root

# .iex
import MyApp.IexUtilities

and the function is available in your iex session

iex> user = u "demo"
%MyApp.User{id: 42, username: "demo", name: "John Doe"}

Macros

You can take this a bit further and automatically assign it to a variable within the iex session by using a macro and an unhygienic variable. The variable defined with var!/1 will bleed out to the outer scope meaning you can type u "username" and have the result automaitcally added to a variable, in this case user;

defmodule MyApp.IexUtilities do
  defmacro u(id_or_username) do
    var!(user) = MyApp.Users.find_user(unquote(id_or_username))
  end
end

and now in your iex session you can easily lookup a user to work with.

iex> u "demo"
%MyApp.User{id: 42, username: "demo", name: "John Doe"}
iex> user
%MyApp.User{id: 42, username: "demo", name: "John Doe"}