21 May 2012

Erlang on Mac OS X

Erlang is a very nice programming language that you can download on erlang.org. Binary packages exists for Windows, Linux distributions usually provide packages to install erlang, but on Mac OS, there is nothing.

But erlang works nicely on Mac OS, you just have to install it from sources and it's pretty straightforward.

• Install XCode (from App Store), it contains all rquired tools to build erlang.

• Download erlang source code (currently otp_src_R15B01.tar.zip) from erlang.org.

• Open a terminal and go in the directory where you downloaded the file:

  $ unzip otp_src_R15B01.tar.zip
  $ tar -xvf otp_src_R15B01.tar
  $ cd otp_src_R15B01
  $ ./configure
  $ make
  $ sudo make install
  

That's all. You can check that erlang is working on your computer by launching an erlang console:

$ erl
Erlang R15B01 (erts-5.9.1) [source] [smp:4:4] [async-threads:0] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.9.1  (abort with ^G)
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