Using Elixir head version with Mise

In 2025 I followed the direction many people headed in and switched my version manager to mise-en-place. It has been going really well for me, but recently I came across a problem which took me a bit to figure out (and few very frustrating conversations with LLM, which did not lead to anything). I wanted to test some code with unreleased version 1.20 of Elixir, straight from git.

How to do it? It’s really simple in retrospect. Here are the steps:

1. Build Elixir

$ git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir.git 
$ cd elixir
$ make

Verify it’s built correctly:

$ bin/elixir --version
> Elixir 1.20.0-dev (88cbabf) (compiled with Erlang/OTP 28)

2. Link it in mise

mise link elixir@head /path/to/elixir

3. Verify this works

$ mise x elixir@head -- elixir --version
> Elixir 1.20.0-dev (88cbabf) (compiled with Erlang/OTP 28)

And it’s done. Whenever you want to run something with Elixir head, you can just mise use elixir@head.

Of course, this should work in a similar way for everything that is handles by mise version control.