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

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September 9, 2025
How to redirect back to previous page in Elixir & Phoenix?
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Table of contents

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

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