Work with Umbrella Applications

Why do we need umbrellas?

Contexts can help us determine how to break our application into more manageable parts. As our applicaiton continues to grow, we may find that we want a greater degree of separation between the components. This can happen if individual contexts start to grow too large or if we’re to deploy different parts of our application separately.

Umbrellas allow us to easily group multiple applications into the same mix project and source code repository. Instead of bundling all of our code into a single application, we can split it up into multiple applications. Elixir’s mix new and Phoenix’s mix phx.new generators support creating umbrella projects by passing the --umbrella flag.

Understand umbrellas

An umbrella project consists of a top-level mix project (usually called the umbrella project) and several sub-projects inside the apps/ directory (usually called child applications).

Note: When working with Elixir and OTP, terminology can get a little confusing, particularly with the words “project” and “application.” In this case, a “project” is something we use to ...