Installing Erlang on Ubuntu

Lets rewind to about a month ago. As I usually do, I skipped past the README files and installed Erlang with apt-get. Ten seconds later, I had Erlang up and running on my Ubuntu development VM. Like a bad teenage horror movie, I’m sure you can see where this is going.

Fast forward to present day. I was running into another serious compiler error with Erlang. A few of the Erlang web frameworks were refusing to compile – again. As usual, the error message being thrown by Erlang was as cryptic as Aramaic spoken with a lisp. Nothing turned up in Google about the error. I even hopped on the #erlang channel on IRC hopping to get a few pointers.

No one had a direct answer, but I did get a clue. One person mentioned that Erlang is very good telling you vary far in advance if there will be any breaking changes in future releases. I also found out that I was using an Alpha release. Not good, not good at all.

So armed with this new information and a few hunches, I un-installed Erlang (again) and download the last stable release – R12B-5 at the time of this article. Here’s what I did.

sudo apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev
tar xvzf otp_src_R12B-5.tar.gz
cd otp_src_R12B-5/
./configure
make
sudo make install

I had to install libncurses5 and libncurses5-dev since it wasn’t installed on my Ubuntu development VM.

After building Erlang from source, I went back to compile my code and everything worked. Erlang is definitely death by 1,000 cuts. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

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