That depends on how did you start your OTP application. To connect to the node it needs to be started with either --name or --sname flag. You can check the name of currently running session with node() $ iex Erlang/OTP 18 [erts-7.2.1] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [async-threads:10] [kernel-poll:false] Interactive Elixir (1.3.0) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help) iex(1)> node() :nonode