Workflow Tips

Here are some tips for working with Julia efficiently.

REPL-based workflow

As already elaborated in The Julia REPL, Julia's REPL provides rich functionality that facilitates an efficient interactive workflow. Here are some tips that might further enhance your experience at the command line.

A basic editor/REPL workflow

The most basic Julia workflows involve using a text editor in conjunction with the julia command line. A common pattern includes the following elements:

• Put code under development in a temporary module. Create a file, say Tmp.jl, and include within it

    module Tmp

    <your definitions here>

    end
    ```
  * **Put your test code in another file.** Create another file, say `tst.jl`, which begins with

    ```julia
    import Tmp
    ```

    and includes tests for the contents of `Tmp`.
    Alternatively, you can wrap the contents of your test file in a module, as

    ```
    module Tst
        using Tmp

        <scratch work>

    end
    ```

    The advantage is that you can now do `using Tmp` in your test code and can therefore avoid prepending
    `Tmp.` everywhere. The disadvantage is that code can no longer be selectively copied to the REPL
    without some tweaking.
  * **Lather. Rinse. Repeat.** Explore ideas at the `julia` command prompt. Save good ideas in `tst.jl`.

### Simplify initialization

To simplify restarting the REPL, put project-specific initialization code in a file, say `_init.jl`,
which you can run on startup by issuing the command:

julia -L _init.jl

If you further add the following to your `~/.julia/config/startup.jl` file

julia isfile("init.jl") && include(joinpath(pwd(), "init.jl")) ```

then calling julia from that directory will run the initialization code without the additional command line argument.

Browser-based workflow

It is also possible to interact with a Julia REPL in the browser via IJulia. See the package home for details.