Setting up Cowboy

In this recipe, we will set up Cowboy. We will add it as a dependency for our application and get ready to implement some functionalities, such as static file serving and websockets, in later recipes.

Getting ready

To get ourselves started, we will create a Mix application. To do this, enter the following command in a terminal window:

> mix new cowboy_app --sup

How to do it…

Now that we have created our Elixir application, we will set up Cowboy by following these steps:

1. Add Cowboy as a dependency in the mix.exs file under the deps method:

   defp deps do
     [ 
      { :cowboy, "~> 1.0.0"} 
     ]
   end

2. Fetch the dependencies by issuing the following command in a terminal window:

   > mix deps.get
   

   The dependencies will be fetched and the output will be similar to this:

   

   Dependencies' installation

3. We will now compile the dependencies:

   > mix deps.compile
   

4. Before we can use Cowboy, there is still one thing to do. We will add it to the applications section in our mix.exs file:

   def application...