Installing Erlang on Mac OS X Lion (10.7)

If you’ve just upgraded to Mac OS Lion, you might have a little trouble installing erlang.

If you’re like me, and would rather not spend an entire day compiling code, try running these steps below. Note, this should be run on a freshly unpacked tar ball as Erlang’s make clean doesn’t clean everything properly.

# download the tar ball
$ wget http://erlang.org/download/otp_src_R13B04.tar.gz

# unpack the tar ball
$ tar zxvf otp_src_R13B04.tar.gz

# cd to the directory 
$ cd otp_src_R13B04

# This will prepare the Makefile
$ CFLAGS=-O0 ./configure --prefix=/usr/share/erlang --enable-threads --enable-darwin-64bit

# Compile and install
$ make && sudo make install

Now, add the following to ~/.bash_profile:

# For erlang
# I was told to add this by Gavin Morrice: http://gavinmorrice.com/blog_posts/12
ERLANG_HOME=/usr/share/erlang
export PATH=$PATH:$ERLANG_HOME/bin

Save .bash_profile and then run:

$ source ~/.bash_profile

You can check that Erlang is now working with the shell command erl

Installing Erlang on Mac OS X Lion (10.7)