Install Develpment Tools

MAD is the best tool I found to work with cowboy, once it solves a lot of problems when you are in development mode, like re-loading the code after changes, generating releases, etc... As said in it's documentation, rebar is good for static compilation, but MAD is also good for dynamic. So install mad in your tools directory, I suggest you to create /usr/local/erlang and from there clone and make it.

$ mkdir /usr/local/erlang 
$ cd /usr/local/erlang/ 
$ git clone https://github.com/synrc/mad
$ cd mad 
$ make 

Now edit your .bashrc or .zshrc file (depending on the shell you use) adding the mad executable in your path.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/erlang/mad

Get dependencies

$ mad deps

Compile

$ mad compile

Order Apps

As you may know you can create OTP releases with reltool (rebar generate) or systools (relx). mad currently creates releases with relx but is going to do it independently soon. Now it can only order applications.

$ mad plan

Run in Development Mode

• go to apps directory

mad repl

I suggest you to use tmux and have this command line as a right window so now, you can go to src, edit and save using a good editor like vim, sublime, save and follow-up the dynamic compilation.

Create new Release

mad rel

Directory Structure

Directory 'deps' for the dependencies, and 'apps' for your group of applications.

Note that 'deps' is created automatically and is ignored by .gitignore, so git will only track your code, not dependencies. Notice that .gitignore is also on sub-directories

Application Layers

Database

Server

Client