Like the topic says. Using apt installs 1.7, and says there are no more updates. Since Phoenix only requires 1.6+, maybe it’s just fine, but is there any other functionality that is missing?
I wouldn’t trust distro packagers to give you the lastest version of software in general. Can you use a different installer like adsf? The hw itself supports higher versions (elixir-nerves distros are up to date)
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OS packages are generally there to be a dependency of some other package. They are stable, but out of date, as they don’t increase major versions after the OS is released.
Erlang Solutions maintains up to date packages: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/resources/download.html
Packages are much more important for Erlang than for Elixir. Once you have an up to date Erlang, you can simply download Elixir from https://elixir-lang.org/
ASDF is great for managing app dependencies: https://www.cogini.com/blog/using-asdf-with-elixir-and-phoenix/
It will take a while to compile Erlang, though, so if your machine doesn’t have a lot of resources, you can use the OS package for Erlang and use ASDF for Elixir.
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The official installation instructions at https://elixir-lang.org/install.html advise using apt or apt-get for all Linux and RPi installs. It doesn’t make sense that these commands would install outdated versions.
Perhaps those should be changed, but expecting an is package manager to be updated is misunderstanding how Linux packaging works. Ubuntu is generally lagging behind debian, even. Centos was famous for lagging behind red hat, which was itself behind fedora. The value prop is exactly that these distros are behind, so they present a relatively stable and matured experience.
Is there a better installation guide than the one at elixir-lang.org? I found good instructions for building and installing Erlang at the official site but for Elixir everywhere is just recommending apt or brew install.
That link also clearly says:
If your distribution contains an old Elixir/Erlang version, see the sections below for installing Elixir/Erlang from version managers or from source.
So, follow that sentence and use asdf.
To be honest, in 15 years I have not yet the luxury of only needing a single version of a language installed.
And those versions that have been required by the projects always have been either behind or newer than the systems version.
So unless you are on nixOS, using asdf-vm for everything is a very good advice.
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