FreeBSD’s not linux, I 100% use the 2 main elixir flavours for production usage. They are very up to date, if anybody needs an older version, we can organise that. Just open a ticket at bugs.freebsd.org and I’ll get to it.

The main difference now is:

• lang/elixir tracks stable elixir (1.16.x release), uses an older erlang release (lang/erlang which is OTP25.x presently)
• lang/elixir-devel tracks latest elixir (1.17.x releases atm), and uses the latest OTP release lang/erlang-runtime27 available thats compatible)

There are 2 distinct package repositories available on FreeBSD. The default quarterly is taken from the faster-moving latest every quarter, and gets security fixes only backported to it.

the latest one is YOLO arch-style, updated very frequently, in line with OTP & Elixir updates. That said, we use it in production and I’ve not had any issues in years. It depends on your appetite for stability vs up-to-date-ness.

asdf should be available soon on FreeBSD, there’s patches for it ready atm, or you can use sysutils/mise which is already present. RIIR its nice and fast.

The binary packages come from the ports tree and usually the *-devel packages are more up-to-date with dependencies. The easiest way to check what’s the difference between elixir and elixir-devel is to check the port dependencies and/or applied patches. After a quick glance, it looks like elixir depends on Erlang 25 and elixir-devel on Erlang 27.

You can use the tools that FreeBSD provides to inspect information about installed or not installed packages, pkg info and pkg rquery respectively.

It also looked like elixir was on the 1.16.3 version and elixir-devel was 1.17.2, too.