Agents

Understand agents as background processes in Elixir.

We'll cover the following...

Introduction

An agent is a background process that maintains a state. We can access this state at different places within a process, within a node, or across multiple nodes. A function sets the initial state we pass when we start the agent.

We can interrogate the state using Agent.get, passing it the agent descriptor and a function. The agent runs the function on its current state and returns the result. We can also use Agent.update to change the state held by ...