How to Enable IEx Shell History and Search

Have you ever CTRL-C‘d your way out of a long running IEx session? All of your commands, bound variables, imports, and aliases down the toilet.

If only IEx had a shell history - like bash or zsh.

Well today is your lucky day, because here’s how to enable IEx (and erl) shell history!

The Secret

Add this line to your bash (or zsh) profile:

# IEx (and erl) shell history
export ERL_AFLAGS="-kernel shell_history enabled"

This line will persist your history between IEx sessions

If you’d like to configure the size of the history, the flag -kernel shell_history_file_bytes can be used (The default is 512KB)

• 1MB: -kernel shell_history_file_bytes 1024000
• 2MB (You probably don’t need more than this): -kernel shell_history_file_bytes 2048000

This lets you use the up arrow for previous commands and use CTRL-r reverse search. IEx just got a whole lot more ergonomic!