Hello World in Elixir

Welcome to the Hello World in Elixir page! Here, you'll find the source code for this program as well as a description of how the program works.

Current Solution

IO.puts "Hello, World!"

Hello World in Elixir was written by:

• Jeremy Grifski

This article was written by:

• Jeremy Grifski
• rzuckerm

If you see anything you'd like to change or update, please consider contributing.

How to Implement the Solution

Alright, let's get right to it.

As we can see, Hello World in Elixir is just a single line of code. As usual, let's dig into it a bit.

Up first, we have a reference to the IO module. In Elixir, the IO module is the standard tool for working with standard input and output as well as files and other devices. So, it makes sense that we'd use it here to gain access to standard output.

Up next, we call the puts function of the IO module. Like print in most languages, puts simply writes a value to standard output. In fact, we aren't limited to standard output. We can redirect the output to other streams such as standard error:

IO.puts :stderr, "Uh Oh!"

At any rate, puts, in our primary example, will simply write "Hello, World!" to the user. To be honest, I'm surprised this is only the second time we've seen the puts keyword in this series, the first being Ruby.

How to Run the Solution

As always, if we want to give the code above a try, we can use an online Elixir editor. Copy the code into the editor and hit run.

Alternatively, we can run the solution locally if we download the latest version of Elixir. After that, we'll want to get a copy of the solution. Assuming Elixir is in our path, all we have to do is run the following commands from the command line:

elixir hello-world.ex

If successful, the "Hello, World" string should print to the console.