Peep

Help run an Ember CLI application from Elixir/Phoenix

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed as:

1. Add peep to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

   def deps do [{:peep, "~> 0.0.1"}] end

2. Ensure peep is started before your application:

   def application do [applications: [:peep]] end

Usage

Peep provides two many Plugs that should be used to serve your Ember application; one to handle your "regular" static assets (CSS and JavaScript files) and one to serve the index.html file.

Peep.Plug.Assets

The first of these is used to serve the static assets. I can be added to your endpoint.ex file like so:

defmodule MyCoolApp.Endpoint do
  use Phoenix.Endpoint, otp_app: :mycoolapp

  ...

  plug Peep.Plug.Assets

  ...
end

The key here is that it is added toward the top of the endpoint.ex file, near where the regular Plug.Static plug would be found.

Peep.Plug.Index

This plug is used within the router to catch any NoRouteErrors thrown, and to instead serve up the Ember application's index.html. This allows any API routes to be matched first, but in the case that none match, have the Ember app be used instead. Note: This means that your Ember application will be responsible for any 404 requests to your application.

The usage of this plug is like so; it should be added to your web/router.ex file, just after you use the :router plug:

defmodule MyCoolApp.Router do
  use MyCoolApp.Web, :router
  use Peep.Plug.Index

  ...
end

Configuration

Peep can be configured as such, in the config/config.exs file for your application.

Config Option	Description
ember_app	Path to root of Ember app, relative to project root
ember_path	Path to Ember executable, relative to ember_app
ember_dist_dir	Name of the subdirectory that the Ember app is built into

The default values are below:

config :peep,
    ember_app: "ui",
    ember_path: "./node_modules/.bin/ember",
    ember_dist_dir: "dist"

New Project Setup

If you're setting up a new Phoenix/Ember application and want to use Peep, here are my suggestions on how to best do that:

$ mix phoenix.new my_cool_app --no-brunch
$ cd my_cool_app
$ git init
$ ember new my_cool_app --skip-git --directory ui

This will create both a Phoenix application, without the default Brunch configuration, and an Ember application inside of it with the same name inside a directory called ui. If you choose to use a directory other than ui, you just need to change the configuration for Peep (see the above section).