Creating a start_link

Let’s breathe life into our QuizManager GenServer by starting a process.

Role of our application

The primary role of the application will be to provide the following for the boundary layer:

  • Packaging structure

  • Lifecycle support

Here’s how it will work.

When our application starts via Application.start, that function doesn’t call our boundary’s start links directly. Instead, it will call our supervisor’s start_link, and that process will start and monitor our application’s main processes.

Starting up the quiz manager

Let’s set up our application to start our QuizManager whenever we start it via mix. That should be pretty easy to do since we need only start a single copy of our application. When the supervisor starts, it will call the start_link of the boundary layer. Let’s set that up now. We’ll open up /lib/mastery/boundary/quiz_manager.ex and add this start_link callback right below the init callback, like this:

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