Elixir Style Guide
A community-driven style guide for writing consistent and idiomatic Elixir code.
What is Elixir Style Guide?
The Elixir Style Guide is a community-driven resource that provides conventions and best practices for writing Elixir code. It covers formatting, naming, documentation, module organization, and other aspects to help developers produce consistent and idiomatic code. The guide aligns with tools like Elixir's built-in code formatter and serves as a reference for teams and individuals.
Elixir developers of all levels, from beginners learning the language to experienced teams seeking to standardize their codebases. It is particularly useful for open-source contributors, educators, and organizations adopting Elixir.
Developers choose this guide because it is community-maintained, comprehensive, and practical. It offers clear examples and explanations, integrates with Elixir's tooling (e.g., the formatter), and helps reduce stylistic debates by providing a shared baseline for code quality.
Overview
A community driven style guide for Elixir
Use Cases
Best For
- Teams adopting Elixir and needing consistent coding standards
- Open-source projects seeking to align with community conventions
- Code reviews where stylistic consistency is a priority
- Learning Elixir idioms and best practices as a beginner
- Integrating with linters or formatters like Credo or Mix format
- Writing maintainable documentation and typespecs in Elixir modules
Not Ideal For
- Teams with strict, proprietary coding standards that diverge from community conventions
- Solo developers or experimental projects where minimal rules and maximum flexibility are prioritized
- Environments relying solely on automated linters without needing a human-readable reference guide
- Projects requiring real-time enforcement or integration with CI/CD without additional tool setup
Pros & Cons
Pros
Covers formatting, naming, documentation, module organization, and more with detailed examples, as seen in the extensive README sections, making it a one-stop reference for Elixir best practices.
Explicitly aligns with Elixir's built-in code formatter (from v1.6) and references tools like Credo, ensuring practical applicability and reducing manual formatting work.
Provides side-by-side code snippets for 'preferred' and 'not preferred' styles across all guidelines, such as in piping operators and struct definitions, aiding quick adoption.
Offers translations in multiple languages (e.g., Chinese, Spanish, Japanese), as listed in the README, broadening its reach and inclusivity for non-English speakers.
Cons
Lacks built-in enforcement mechanisms; teams must manually adopt rules or integrate external tools like linters, which can lead to inconsistent compliance in practice.
Acknowledges other style guides (e.g., Aleksei Magusev's, Credo's) in the README, potentially causing confusion or debate over which conventions to follow in mixed environments.
Admits gaps in certain areas, such as having 'no guidelines for regular expressions yet,' indicating that developers might need to seek additional resources for some topics.
Frequently Asked Questions
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