---
title: Announcing Constable, an open source Phoenix application
teaser: Check out a production ready Elixir/Phoenix application.
tags: elixir,phoenix,web
author:
- Blake Williams
- Paul Smith
published_on: 2016-10-04
---

In the early days of Phoenix we started a project called Constable during our
investment time. We created it to improve how we make announcements and have
discussions within our company, but most of all we wanted an excuse to write an
app in [Elixir] and [Phoenix].

[Elixir]: http://elixir-lang.org/
[Phoenix]: http://www.phoenixframework.org/

We used Constable as a test bed for different technologies and ways of working
with Elixir. We started with a JSON API and a React front end and slowly
migrated to [server rendered HTML].

[server rendered HTML]: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-we-replaced-react-with-phoenix

Check out [the code on GitHub] or try out the [demo on
Heroku](https://constable-demo.herokuapp.com). All you need is a gmail account
and you'll be able to sign in! We've disabled email in the demo, so there's no
need to worry about receiving unwanted emails.

[the code on GitHub]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/constable

## What you can learn

This is a project we're using every single day, and something we're constantly
improving and experimenting with. You can follow the project on GitHub, check
out how the code has evolved, and even deploy it yourself if you want.

## About the app

Typical messaging applications send you a flood of email. We wanted to make
sure that Constable was customizable so that you only get emails you really care
about.

The app has a concept called "interests" which are tags that you can subscribe
to so you only get the emails that are relevant to you. By default the only
interest you're interested in is the `#everyone` interest, but you can even
unsubscribe from that.

Most people want as few distractions as possible. We think Constable helps us
immensely to achieve that goal.

## What we love about Phoenix

We've talked about Phoenix a few times on past blog posts, and written a few
libraries, but we haven't talk a lot about what we love about it.

* Fast-running tests make TDD a joy.
* Lightning fast page rendering. Makes server rendered pages feel instantaneous.
* Similar enough to Rails that newcomers can get started easily.

We hope you love Constable.