Installing Elixir on Ubuntu 13.04

I just installed Elixir and there were one or two non-obvious points.

Elixir requires Erlang OTP 16, and the Ubuntu package repos contain release 15. So the Ubuntu Erlang packages won’t cut it.

Instead, install Erlang from the Erlang Solutions repository. Add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list (GUI: from the Ubuntu Software Center: Edit->Software Sources->Other Software->Add…).

deb http://binaries.erlang-solutions.com/debian raring contrib

The Erlang Solutions page only lists sources up to “quantal”, but I tried “raring” and it works fine.

Also add the relevant public key:

wget -O - http://binaries.erlang-solutions.com/debian/erlang_solutions.asc \
| sudo apt-key add -

(That’s copied directly from the Erlang Solutions site)

Then update and install. Be sure to install esl-erlang rather than the erlang package provided by Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install esl-erlang

After that you can just follow the instructions for compiling on the Elixir home page.

2 comments

  1. I know this is kinda late but Happy Birthday Avdi! (Related: Tomorrow is my 29th!) Anyway, what did you think about Elixir? I wouldn’t mind a Ruby Tapas episode about it!

    PS. Episode 114 was so awesome, I couldn’t stop laughing. Thank you for that!

  2. thanks. just beware that you will get an unmet dependency issue, if you are upgrading from a previous version.

    sudo apt-get install esl-erlang

    should read
    sudo apt-get install erlang

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