beno
State of Elixir packages on CentOS 7?
I am in the process of setting up a new server for some project and this one has CentOS 7 on it (new to me). To my surprise, there is no support for elixir in their yum package manager and the only rpm package I could find is for version 0.12 (!). CentOS is a pretty popular server platform I think, so I didn’t expect that.
Now building from source always possible of course, even though it is something the CentOS people expressly advise against, but in general I noticed a very mixed picture when it comes to package support for various platforms: https://pkgs.org/download/elixir
Is that something we can fix? I think it is holding back the language unnecessarily. Has anyone else encountered this?
Marked As Solved
outlog
I would suggest using something like https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf - you want dev/staging/prod to have as matching as possible installs - and you’ll also want to be prepared for zero-day updates, and not be in the hands of a specific distro package maintainer… you might also want to run multiple versions of erlang/elixir on a single server…
Also Liked
easco
I was also surprised to find that Elixir doesn’t have community support for CentOS. For a project I worked on several months ago, I have an Ansible script that install Erlang and Elixir to a CentOS build server. It grabs Erlang from the Erlang Solutions build and then installs Elixir from source. The relevant parts are reproduced below in the hopes that it will help. (For deployments we used Distillery and ERTS)
vars:
erlang_dev_dependencies:
- git
- gcc
- gcc-c++
- glibc-devel
- make
- ncurses-devel
- openssl-devel
- autoconf
- java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel
- wxBase.x86_64
- name: install epel-release
yum:
update_cache: yes
name: epel-release
state: present
- name: Install pacackages required to build erlang
yum:
name: "{{ item }}"
with_items: "{{ erlang_dev_dependencies }}"
- name: Download erlang-solutions rpm package
get_url:
url: http://packages.erlang-solutions.com/erlang-solutions-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
dest: ./erlang-solutions-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
- name: install erlang from that package
yum: name=./erlang-solutions-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
- name: install erlang
yum: name=erlang
- name: Create source directory
file: path=/root/src state=directory
- name: clone elixir repo
git:
repo: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir.git
dest: /root/src/elixir
version: v1.6
- name: build and test Elixir
make:
chdir: /root/src/elixir
target: test
- name: Install Elixir
make:
chdir: /root/src/elixir
target: install
OvermindDL1
I also highly recommend this. Using Erlang/Elixir on RHEL and similar ones is always so sorely out of date otherwise… Or Docker.
AstonJ
Agree too!
Even with Ruby (and things like Postgresql) I do not use the CentOS versions - CentOS prefer stable/old packages and while that’s great for system components, when it comes to things like languages you’ll usually want to use more recent versions 
Same with different versions - some of my Ruby apps for example, use different Ruby versions.
rodrigues
Hi, I need to deploy a few applications to CentOS 7 servers; I didn’t need to install erlang or elixir in the target production/staging machines, as the runtime comes bundled with the application release.
The CentOS edeliver release build machine needs these installed, and for that, I use the github releases from both OTP and Elixir:
Erlang/OTP: https://github.com/erlang/otp/archive/OTP-${OTP_VERSION}.tar.gz
Elixir: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/archive/v${ELIXIR_VERSION}.tar.gz







