building.asciidoc

Building the Erlang Runtime System

In this chapter we will look at different way to configure and build Erlang/OTP to suite your needs. We will use an Ubuntu Linux for most of the examples. If you are using a different OS you can find detailed instructions on how to build for that OS in the documentation in the source code (in HOWTO/INSTALL.md), or on the web INSTALL.html.

There are basically two ways to build the runtime system, the traditional way with autoconf, configure and make or with the help of kerl.

I recommend that you first give the traditional way a try, that way you will get a better understanding of what happens when you build and what settings you can change. Then go over to using kerl for your day to day job of managing configurations and builds.

First Time Build

To get you started we will go though a step by step process of building the system from scratch and then we will look at how you can configure your system for different purposes.

This step by step guide assumes that you have a modern Ubuntu installation. We will look at how to build on OS X and Windows later in this chapter.

Prerequisites

You will need a number of tools in order to fetch, unpack and build from source. The file Install.md lists some of the most important ones.

Gven that we have a recent Ubuntu installation to start with many of the needed tools such as tar, make, perl and gcc should already be installed. But some tools like git, m4 and ncurses will probably need to be installed.

If you add a source URI to your apt configuration you will be able to use the build-dep command to get the needed sources to build erlang. You can do this by uncommenting the deb-src line for your distribution in /etc/apt/sources.list.

For the Yakkety Yak release you could add the line by:

> sudo cat "deb-src http://se.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ \
yakkety main restricted" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

Then the following commands will get almost all the tools you need:

> sudo apt-get install git autoconf m4
> sudo apt-get build-dep erlang

If you have a slightly older version of Ubuntu like Saucy and you want to build with wx support, you need to get the wx libraries:

> sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://repos.codelite.org/CodeLite.asc
> sudo apt-add-repository 'deb http://repos.codelite.org/wx3.0/ubuntu/ saucy universe'
> sudo apt-get update
> sudo apt-get install libwxbase3.0-0-unofficial libwxbase3.0-dev libwxgtk3.0-0-unofficial \
libwxgtk3.0-dev wx3.0-headers wx-common libwxbase3.0-dbg libwxgtk3.0-dbg wx3.0-i18n \
wx3.0-examples wx3.0-doc

You might also want to create a directory where you keep the source code and also install your home built version without interfering with any pre built and system wide installations.

> cd
> mkdir otp

Getting the source

There are two main ways of getting the source. You can download a tarball from erlang.org or you can check out the source code directly from Github.

If you want to quickly download a stable version of the source try:

> cd ~/otp
> wget http://erlang.org/download/otp_src_19.1.tar.gz
> tar -xzf otp_src_19.1.tar.gz
> cd otp_src_19.1
> export ERL_TOP=`pwd`

or if you want to be able to easily update to the latest bleeding edge or you want to contribute fixes back to the community you can check out the source through git:

> cd ~/otp
> git clone https://github.com/erlang/otp.git source
> cd source
> export ERL_TOP=`pwd`
> ./otp_build autoconf

Now you are ready to build and install Erlang:

> export LANG=C
> ./configure --prefix=$HOME/otp/install
> make
> make install
> export PATH=$HOME/otp/install/bin/:$PATH
> export ROOTDIR=$HOME/otp/install/

Building with Kerl

An easier way to build especially if you want to have several different builds available to experiment with is to build with Kerl.