mockra

I’ve been writing several bots and scripts using Elixir lately, and I’ve found it to be a pretty great option. One of the key tools I’ve been using is the quantum-elixir library.

If you’ve ever used cronjobs before, quantum provides the same type of functionality. You can setup scheduled tasks to run at specific intervals through your config file. Here’s an example config/config.exs file:

  config :quantum, cron: [
    # Every 2 minutes
    "*/2 * * * *": {Mockra.Bot, :run},
  ]

In this example, the run function on my bot module will run every 2 minutes.

Once I’ve setup my script and config, I’ll use mix to run my script. I’ll use the following command in a tmux session:

  MIX_ENV=prod mix run --no-halt

I’ve transferred a few ruby and node scripts to Elixir, and the droplet I use for scripts has dropped from ~85% CPU load to ~1.5%. These are all unoptimized, but I was pretty surprised by the results.