Help installing Elixir on Linux Mint

This seems to be quite a lot of trying. Can you please remove all of your installation attempts?

Then it’s probably easiest to switch to Arch Linux or just use a toolset manager like asdf-vm. It will be able to install, run and change appropriate version sets as you specify them per project.

Also in the official documentation there is a compatibility matrix that tells you which version of elixir is known to work with which version of Erlang.

Just remember that the runtime version of Erlang needs to be equal to or greater than the version used for compiling.

Installing Elixir on Linux (with asdf)

Thanks for the replies.

I tried asdf as well but was struggling to get it to find the newest version. I hadn’t seen this link so I will try again.

I saw this compatibility table (Compatibility and deprecations — Elixir v1.20.2) but I couldn’t get any of these combinations to work. For instance I tried otp 20, 20.1, 20.2, 21.0, 21.1, 21.2 with a few versions of elixir 1.7 and 1.8 and some other combinations.

I saw the errors about unmatching runtime/compile time Erlang versions, so I’ve been careful to recompile elixir after reinstalling a different Erlang version. I keep getting errors like this though:

Loading of /usr/local/lib/erlang/lib/crypto-4.5/ebin/crypto.beam failed: badfile

Makefile:62: recipe for target ‘erlang’ failed

Anyway, thanks again for the replies, I’ll try asdf again now.

@peerreynders I can’t get asdf to work. I added plugin for elixir, installed then tried to use it and got the error:

01:10:27.753 [error] Loading of /usr/local/lib/erlang/lib/compiler-7.4/ebin/compile.beam failed: :badfile

01:10:27.754 [error] beam/beam_load.c(1878): Error loading module compile:
This BEAM file was compiled for a later version of the run-time system than 21.
To fix this, please recompile this module with an 21 compiler.
(Use of opcode 164; this emulator supports only up to 163.)

Please deinstall all former tries, also make sure that the location containing asdfs shims is located before your systems binaries in PATH.

I had issues installing Elixir on Linux initially too. I ended up using an installer provided on the Erlang Solutions website, which bundled Erlang and Elixir together. That seemed to be the easiest way to get started (though I intend on trying a version manager such as asdf soon).

Edit: Corrected misunderstood website source.

This is not the Erlang website! This is the website of Erlang solutions, a big supporter of the Erlang ecosystem.

Also even though mint is a derivat of Ubuntu, I’d be careful to use the packages that were originally built for Debian and Ubuntu. Dependencies might not be available on mints repositories natively.

PS: even though it doesn’t sound like this right now, usually I strictly prefer installation from the systems package manager over installation from source. But especially for languages compilers I learnt to love version managers like asdf, they really make life easier when one is using them with discipline.

My bad on the mix-up. I’ve corrected my post. I agree regarding version managers — I’d love to have a well-designed manager like rvm for Elixir. I’m hoping that asdf is just as user-friendly.

I’ve Linux Mint 19 with over 10 versions of erlang and elixir installed via asdf without any problems:

alexiss@alexiss:/work/home/alexiss$ asdf list erlang
  20.0
  20.1
  20.2.2
  20.2.3
  20.3.1
  20.3.2
  21.0.8
  21.1.1
  21.2.1
  21.3.2
  21.3.6
  21.3.8
  22.0.1
alexiss@alexiss:/work/home/alexiss$ asdf list elixir
  1.5.1
  1.5.2
  1.6.1
  1.6.4
  1.7.2
  1.7.3
  1.7.4
  1.8.1
  1.8.2
alexiss@alexiss:/work/home/alexiss$ 

Try to install it step-by-step following links from this post

Also make sure you complete all steps for Ubuntu before installing erlang