Manually Install Erlang on Linux

Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance.

Applications that are built on Erlang also required Erlang's runtime for execution. Last week I got a chance to work on a Message Broker 'RabbitMQ' (will discuss it in other post) which is built on Erlang. So to get RabbitMQ Server installed on my machine I have to setup Erlang first. This post contains the steps for installing RabbitMQ Server manually on Linux machine. Following are the steps:

Get the Erlang package that you need to install

• In my case I have otp_src_R14B02.tar.gz

Unzip the package:

• tar xvzf otp_src_R14B02.tar.gz

Go to folder:

• cd otp_src_R14B02/

Following files may be required to install on your OS before running the configuration file:

If it gives gcc compiler error then install gcc compiler with following command:

• sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++ autoconf automake
• sudo yum install make
• sudo yum install ncurses-devel

For Ubuntu following command will be used:

• sudo apt-get install build-essential
• sudo apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev

Run cofigure File

• ./configure

After running the configuration file, run the make command on same folder:

• make

And in the and execute following command:

• sudo make install

This will install Erlang on Linux and it can be tested using following command:

• erl

It will show following lines:

Erlang R14B02 (erts-5.8.3) [source] [smp:4:4] [rq:4] [async-threads:0] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.8.3  (abort with ^G)

1>

rizzz86