State of Elixir packages on CentOS 7?

Questions / Help
,
1

I am in the process of setting up a new server for some project and this one has CentOS 7 on it (new to me). To my surprise, there is no support for elixir in their yum package manager and the only rpm package I could find is for version 0.12 (!). CentOS is a pretty popular server platform I think, so I didn’t expect that.

Now building from source always possible of course, even though it is something the CentOS people expressly advise against, but in general I noticed a very mixed picture when it comes to package support for various platforms: https://pkgs.org/download/elixir

Is that something we can fix? I think it is holding back the language unnecessarily. Has anyone else encountered this?

2

Afaik the core teams position is that it’s to be in the communities responsibility to care for package support not theirs. There are simply many systems out there and packaging is also something you need some hardware for, which I wouldn’t say should be the burden of the core team. On the other hand maybe look at the packages erlang solutions does supply. It seems like they currently only have erlang for cent os, but maybe they could also package elixir for cent os.

3

Erlang Solutions offer up-to-date packages for Ubuntu and Debian.
For Cent OS, they have Erlang/OTP packages only but maybe that’s already useful enough for you?
Check out their packages here: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/resources/download.html

4

Thanks, Erlang is not the issue, it is specifically Elixir that is MIA. I have now used one of the version managers (kiex), but even there I get complaints about “unknown Linux distro” and such. Anyway, I got it working, but I am still quite puzzled that a mainstream distribution like CentOS is not better supported.

5

I would suggest using something like https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf - you want dev/staging/prod to have as matching as possible installs - and you’ll also want to be prepared for zero-day updates, and not be in the hands of a specific distro package maintainer… you might also want to run multiple versions of erlang/elixir on a single server…

5 Likes
6

It’s really the folks at Centos who don’t offer better support for Elixir :slight_smile:

7

And nobody in the elixir community has stepped up yet to maintain a cent os package. I’m not aware the core team supports any package repositories at all. Even the docker image tagged “official” is provided by someone in the community.

8

I was also surprised to find that Elixir doesn’t have community support for CentOS. For a project I worked on several months ago, I have an Ansible script that install Erlang and Elixir to a CentOS build server. It grabs Erlang from the Erlang Solutions build and then installs Elixir from source. The relevant parts are reproduced below in the hopes that it will help. (For deployments we used Distillery and ERTS)

  vars:
    erlang_dev_dependencies:
      - git
      - gcc
      - gcc-c++
      - glibc-devel
      - make
      - ncurses-devel
      - openssl-devel
      - autoconf
      - java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel
      - wxBase.x86_64

  - name: install epel-release
    yum: 
      update_cache: yes 
      name: epel-release
      state: present

  - name: Install pacackages required to build erlang
    yum: 
      name: "{{ item }}"
    with_items: "{{ erlang_dev_dependencies }}"
  
  - name: Download erlang-solutions rpm package
    get_url: 
      url: http://packages.erlang-solutions.com/erlang-solutions-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
      dest: ./erlang-solutions-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

  - name: install erlang from that package
    yum: name=./erlang-solutions-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

  - name: install erlang
    yum: name=erlang

  - name: Create source directory
    file: path=/root/src state=directory

  - name: clone elixir repo
    git:
      repo: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir.git
      dest: /root/src/elixir
      version: v1.6

  - name: build and test Elixir
    make:
      chdir: /root/src/elixir
      target: test

  - name: Install Elixir
    make:
      chdir: /root/src/elixir
      target: install
4 Likes
9

The answer is simple given the version of Erlang available in EPEL:

You can not run elixir 1.0 on OTP 16.

10

I also highly recommend this. Using Erlang/Elixir on RHEL and similar ones is always so sorely out of date otherwise… Or Docker.

2 Likes
11

Agree too!

Even with Ruby (and things like Postgresql) I do not use the CentOS versions - CentOS prefer stable/old packages and while that’s great for system components, when it comes to things like languages you’ll usually want to use more recent versions :smiley:

Same with different versions - some of my Ruby apps for example, use different Ruby versions.

2 Likes
12

This was gold! Thank you!

13

Hi, I need to deploy a few applications to CentOS 7 servers; I didn’t need to install erlang or elixir in the target production/staging machines, as the runtime comes bundled with the application release.

The CentOS edeliver release build machine needs these installed, and for that, I use the github releases from both OTP and Elixir:

Erlang/OTP: https://github.com/erlang/otp/archive/OTP-${OTP_VERSION}.tar.gz
Elixir: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/archive/v${ELIXIR_VERSION}.tar.gz

1 Like