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

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 Using Erlang/Elixir on RHEL and similar ones is always so sorely out of date otherwise… Or Docker.

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

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