The Phoenix Framework was built with realtime communication as a first class priority. Using its built in socket handling and channels we can implement a basic, realtime chat application with little effort.

For this video we’re going to assume that you already have Elixir and Phoenix Setup. You will not need a database as the messages will not be persisted. This tutorial is taken pretty much directly from the Phoenix Documentation.

To start let’s generate a standard phoenix application:

$> mix phoenix.new instachat