Erlbrew is a bash script designed to reduce the pain of installing various versions of Erlang side-by-side.
Drop erlbrew into $HOME/bin. Make sure it's executable as in chmod +x erlbrew. You may optionally need to throw a hash -r to your bash shell.
You should also edit your $PATH to include $HOME/bin/.erlbrew.d in whatever
position you like. It probably makes the most sense to put it first in your
list though.
erlbrew explicitly relies on the following tools:
- bash
- GNU tar
- curl
It also assumes that you have a working compiler environment with GNU make, GCC (or Apple's LLVM backed GCC), and other compiler tools like flex and as.
If you installed Apple's "command line compiler" package, you should be good to go. If not, you can get them without having to download all of Xcode from the App Store.
Once erlbrew is installed and executable, it accepts five basic commands:
downloadbuildinstalluselist
These commands do what it says on the tin. install implies build and
download, build implies download. If you wish, you can augment the
flags passed to the configure script by putting them in the shell
variable ERLBREW_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS.
You may also set ERLBREW_MAKE_DOCS if you want erlbrew to build the
release documentation. (The default behavior is to not build
documentation.)
Once you have an installed Erlang environment, use the use command
to make erlbrew build a bunch of symbolic links in $HOME/bin/erlbrew.d/ and
rehash your bash command cache.
You can also use the list command (with no release spec) to see the
installed releases available. A * will be listed next to the release
currently in use.
At the moment only Mac OS X is supported. It should be easy to add Linux or other Unix support.
erlbrew has been tested and works on R14B04 onward. Building Erlang before R14
may or may not work and we have little interest in making it work if its broken. (Sorry!)
For the release of Erlang 17 and later, Ericcson decided to move to a new release naming scheme, dropping the R and the build numbers. So for the these releases, you would type:
$ erlbrew install 17.5
for example.
As of El Capitan (OS X 10.11), Apple removed OpenSSL from its default compiler tool distribution. OS X now ships with Apple's own cryptography library, but Erlang still is bound to OpenSSL.
A new environment variable ERLBREW_OPENSSL_PATH has been added. If erlbrew
detects that it's running on El Capitan, it will search ERLBREW_OPENSSL_PATH
first with a default location of /usr/local/ssl, and as a fall back, there
appears to be an OpenSSL environment that's shipped as part of Xcode. If
neither location exists, then the script will error out.
If you use something like brew install openssl, then you should invoke an
installation like this:
$ ERLBREW_OPENSSL_PATH="/usr/local/opt/openssl" erlbrew install XX.Y
In addition to the SSL library munging above, erlbrew also enables dirty schedulers
for Erlang 17 and 18 and DTrace support for everything. You can override that
by specifying your own ERLBREW_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS if you wish.
N.B. If you specify your own configure options, you must also include appropriate ssl library location(s) if needed.
erlbrew does its work in a work directory located at $HOME/.erlbrew/.build/current
It also writes a logfile in this directory named erlbrew.log which contains
all messages from STDOUT and STDERR.
erlbrew scans its work directory for build directories that are older than 7 days and deletes them automatically.
$ erlbrew use R14B04
You have switched to Erlang R14B04
$ erl
Erlang R14B04 (erts-5.8.5) [source] [64-bit] [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0] [kernel-poll:false]
Eshell V5.8.5 (abort with ^G)
1> q().
ok
$ erlbrew list
* R14B04
R15B03
$ erlbrew install 18.2.1
Downloading Erlang 18.2.1
######################################################################## 100.0%
Tarball has correct MD5 checksum
Unpacking Erlang 18.2.1
Configuring Erlang 18.2.1 for darwin15
Building Erlang 18.2.1
Installing Erlang 18.2.1
Copyright (c) 2016 Mark Allen
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