Noob issue getting Elixir / hello world demo running on FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p1 - undefined function get_session/1

Questions / Help
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Hi all. Elixir noob here, 1st post. Apologies for the wall of text.

Trying out Elixir / Phoenix on my FreeBSD box, following the tute at Up and Running — Phoenix v1.5.8

Firstly, installed this on a fresh Ubuntu 20.10 running in a VM on the FreeBSD box, and that worked fine. Using the instructions from here - Installing Elixir - The Elixir programming language So Im confident that my procedure is correct.

On the FreeBSD host machine, I installed using
pkg install elixir

then followed the same guide as on the linux box
https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/up_and_running.html

Get as far as mix ecto.create and then the problems begin on the FreeBSD box

Final error is

== Compilation error in file lib/plug/debugger.ex ==
** (CompileError) lib/plug/debugger.ex:277: undefined function get_session/1
    (elixir 1.10.4) src/elixir_locals.erl:114: anonymous fn/3 in :elixir_locals.ensure_no_undefined_local/3
    (stdlib 3.8.2.4) erl_eval.erl:680: :erl_eval.do_apply/6

Ive gone through the loop a few times of installing extra elixir pkgs to solve similar errors, but now Ive installed the lot, and stuck with this error. Erlang is installed, and getting in and out of both the Elixir and the Erlang repl is fine.

I can see that both get_session/1 and get_session/2 are defined in deps/plug/lib/plug/conn.ex … and if I compare those files on both my linux box and my FreeBSD box - they are identical (same md5 hash too). So its not the elixir libs at fault.

One big clue - on the FreeBSD install only - it throws a lot of warnings about redefining modules, ie - on mix ecto.create I see these sorts of warnings on a page full of libs :

warning: redefining module Plug.Session.COOKIE (current version loaded from /usr/local/lib/elixir/bin/../lib/plug/ebin/Elixir.Plug.Session.COOKIE.beam)
  lib/plug/session/cookie.ex:1

warning: redefining module Plug.Debugger (current version loaded from /usr/local/lib/elixir/bin/../lib/plug/ebin/Elixir.Plug.Debugger.beam)
  lib/plug/debugger.ex:1

… there is a couple of dozen of such warnings.

Big Clue Nr 2 - There is also a file on my system
/usr/local/lib/elixir/lib/plug/lib/plug/debugger.ex

which is different to the one pulled into deps on the hello project. That version does not call get_session anywhere, so I suspect the compiler is picking up system libs instead of dep libs.

Installed version on my system is
elixir-plug-1.4.5 Composable modules for Elixir web applications

Ideas ?

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I strongly suggest to compile elixir yourself and do not install anything elixir related from your OS’s package manager. Elixir is fairly easy to compile, once you have erlang, which can come from your OS’s package manager, if there is a decent version on it.

Download and compile elixir from the official website, it only take a few minutes. Then, install hex packages solely through mix into the per project deps directory.

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good plan - will try that and report back

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Try installing Erlang and Elixir with asdf.

I used them in FreeBSD 12.1 without a problem.

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Seems like I was overzealous in pkg install exlixir-*

Tried this

  • remove all elixir packages
  • just install elixir, nothing else using pkg repo (because its only 1 point version off the official release)
  • mix deps.get / deps.compile
    … that works !

So the problem was by the look of it - when I got my first round of issues … I “fixed” them by installing more and more system packages, until I ended up installing everything.

Solution is as above - just install the basic Elixir (preferrably from official latest, but pkg is fine in this case) … the key being to let Hex do the work of adding libs to the project locally.

Thanks all - now I have a working Elixir + Phoenix setup on BSD latest. Happy.

Next trick - writing some NIFS code :slight_smile:

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Followup from that - whilst the FreeBSD pkgs are rock solid, I need to hack on Phoenix LiveView … which in turn needs a later version of Elixir, which in turn needs a later version of Erlang.

Solution - use the erlang-runtime23 pkg supplied by FreeBSD, and as Derek suggested above, just grab the latest elixir src and build it. I just git cloned the master repo and built from there.

asdf should work too, but building manually means at least doing

doas zsh
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
gmake clean test

After that, you have a nice up to date set of binaries in the bin dir. So append this to your PATH

then you end up with

elixir -v
Erlang/OTP 23 [erts-11.1.5] [source] [64-bit] [smp:12:12] [ds:12:12:10] [async-threads:1] [dtrace]

Elixir 1.12.0-dev (0792602) (compiled with Erlang/OTP 23)

Yay! Latest !! Very up to date now.

To test it all out

$ mix archive.install hex phx_new 1.5.8
$ mix phx.new hello
$ cd hello

… do the rest, then mix phx.server to run it

Note that localhost:4000 now includes the lovely PhoenixLive Dashboard
Great Success !

This is awesome. Day 1 - I think Im going to enjoy getting into this :wink:

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A call of attention:

If you have used Elixir from the FreeBSD pkg in the same project you have created for the Ubuntu VM then you can run in issues, because the deps were pulled and compiled for the Elixir version in the Ubuntu VM.

So, if that was the case you need to:

rm -rf deps _build  mix.lock assets/node_modules assets/package-lock.json

Now, using the Elixir version installed with pkg get the dependencies again and compile them.

8

Can you use asdf on freebsd? I use that to sort out all my garbage. Tends to be more readily updated than OS level packages.

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I also recommend using asdf that will allow you to run different Erlang/Elixir versions without hassle