Let's Build Something: Elixir, Part 2 - Supervising Our GenServer

In Part 1 we built a simple GenServer and worked our way through making it write a timestamp to a local file.

During that process, we ran into a usage issue - we had to explicitly start the GenServer before we could invoke its write_timestamp/2 function. It makes sense, but it's inconvenient and dependent on human interaction. We should (and can!) fix that.

Automatically Starting Our GenServer

The file lib/stats_yard.ex is the main entry point for our app, so that seems like a good place to add a call to StatsYard.TimestampWriter.start_link/0 (ignoring the supervisor bits for now):

Now to verify that it acts as we'd expect:

Much better! Now let's see what happens when it dies, as most everything on a computer is likely to do at the worst possible time.

There are a few ways to easily kill a process in Elixir, but I always enjoy throwing a value into a function that it can't handle and watching the poor process get shredded. I'm a jerk like that. Let's pass a tuple via the timestamp argument and see what happens:

Excellent! Our GenServer is dead as a hammer. Soooo now what?

Well, we can restart it manually in our iex session, but that's a non-starter when you consider your app running unattended. We could also just drop out of our session and then start it back up, but that's still pretty lame.

Enter supervisors! If we take another glance at the chunk of code we saw above, paying special attention to the bits I said to ignore, we'll see the structure we need to use to start up our GenServer as a supervised process:

• Line 11-14: A list of your Supervisor's child processes, which can either be regular process or another Supervisor (sub-Supervisor)
• Each item in this list will contain the module name for a process and will call that module's start_link function
• Notice that the arguments passed to your start_link function are provided here as a list. This is done so that the Supervisor's start_link function doesn't have to handle arbitrary argument counts (arities) based on your process's start_link arity
• Line 18: A list of Supervisor options. For now, the provided values are more than sufficient, and we'll talk more about what each one means in a later post
• Line 19: The start_link call for your Supervisor process, which (shockingly!) looks awfully similar to the call we make for our own GenServer

Now let's move our GenServer startup bits into the Supervisor's children list, and see what we can make of it:

And the test:

Woohoo! Our application is now considerably more "self-healing" than it was before. We can start up iex, and immediately start writing timestamps without explicitly starting our GenServer. Then we can crash the GenServer process, and immediately continue on writing timestamps without having to explicitly restart the process. Excellent!

Experiments

If you're the curious sort (and you really should be! It's awesome!), you may want to try and poke around with this a bit more by trying to crash our GenServer several times and seeing if the behavior persists. See if you can find a limit to what we've done here, and see if the docs for Elixir's Supervisors can guide you toward a fix.

Next Time

We've got a nice simple GenServer automated and supervised, but there's no guarantee that our next batch of code changes won't break something in some unforeseen way. We'll poke around with ExUnit next time, and see if we can start a basic unit test suite for our project.

For now, you can peruse the source for this post at: https://github.com/strofcon/stats-yard/tree/lets-build-2