Reloading configuration in Elixir (with Mix.Config?)

Question

In my config.exs file, I have

config :my_app,
  foobar: [%{foo: "bar", keywords: ["hello", "world!"]},
           %{foo: "xyz", keywords: ["bloop"]}]

this list is retrieved in the code

Application.get_env(:my_app, :foobar)

But if I were to update this foobar config, the changes will not take into effect until I restart the application.

Alternatively, is there a better way to go about with this? My original solution parsed a list of lists from a file. It worked great whenever I modified the file, but now I want to work with a list of maps.

Answer 1

I am not aware of any solution that would allow to dynamically reload configuration. It would be hard as configuration flags can influence compilation, for example:

defmodule Foo do
  @foo Application.get(:foo, __MODULE__)

  def foo, do: @foo
end

In this snippet @foo will be computed during compilation.

However you can change configuration using Application.put_env/3 , but it will affect only runtime fragments.

Answer 2

How do you use the configuration in the code? The change should take place when you use Application.get_env/2 to retrieve the value. Or is it because the config file needs to be recompiled?