elixir
Introducing Elixir Observer: A Better Way to Explore Elixir Packages
Introducing Elixir Observer, an open-source tool by Mimiquate designed to simplify package discovery in the Elixir ecosystem. With a clean UI, insightful package health indicators, and essential resources at your fingertips, it's built to help developers quickly find and evaluate packages.
We’ve been working on something at Mimiquate that we're really excited to finally share with the community: Elixir Observer. It's an open-source tool designed to simplify how you discover and select Elixir packages for your applications. We first introduced Elixir Observer during lightning talks at GigCity Elixir and ElixirConf Europe, and now it's ready for everyone to try out!
Why Elixir Observer?
We love Elixir, and we know that choosing the right packages is critical. However, we've often found ourselves jumping between different websites—checking Hex.pm, then GitHub, reviewing docs, changelogs, and figuring out if the package is actively maintained.
The existing ecosystem’s package manager (Hex.pm) does its main job well—publishing packages—but understandably doesn’t focus heavily on user-friendly design or providing detailed insights.
This gap has come up frequently within the Elixir community. And, while the community agreed it's outside the scope of the Hex team, we thought, "Why not build it ourselves?"
So we did.
Our Goals with Elixir Observer:
Current Features
As of today, Elixir Observer allows you to easily search for packages and provides detailed package pages that are clean and user-friendly. Each detail page displays popularity and maintenance indicators, giving you an instant overview of a package’s health. Additionally, you’ll find convenient links to essential resources such as the GitHub repository, Hex.pm page, documentation, and changelog. Our focus on usability and thoughtful design ensures that Elixir Observer is both intuitive and enjoyable to use.
What's Next?
We’re releasing Elixir Observer as open-source because we believe collaboration will make it significantly better. We’re already planning:
But we want your input! What would you find useful? How can we make Elixir Observer even more helpful?
Get Involved
Check out Elixir Observer here.
Explore the GitHub repo, raise issues, suggest new features, or even submit a pull request—we'd love your contributions!
We're excited to build this together with the community and make the Elixir ecosystem more accessible and welcoming for everyone.
Happy coding!
