How to redirect back to previous page in Elixir & Phoenix?

In this post, you'll learn how to easily redirect users to the previous path using the Navigation History plug.

It's super easy, first add the plug to dependencies:

def deps do
  [ 
    ...,
    {:navigation_history, "~> 0.3"}]
end

Then, add it to your pipeline of choice (in most cases it's gonna be :browser):

pipeline :browser do
  ...
  plug NavigationHistory.Tracker
end

Now, you can use use available NavigationHistory.last_path/1 function to access the previous path:

redirect(conn, to: NavigationHistory.last_path(conn))

That's it! You can also exclude specific paths from navigation history:

plug NavigationHistory.Tracker, excluded_paths: ["/login", ~r(/admin.*)]

Find more details about this lib here: https://github.com/danhper/plug-navigation-history.

Until next time!

Check this article: Why Elixir & Phoenix is a great choice for your web app in 2022