Installing Erlang on Mac OS X Leopard

Having installed Erlang at work on our lab server for running and testing CouchDB for various projects I feel it’s time I actually start digging in to the language itself and code some applications.

First I was thinking of trying out Erlang for website backend development and mainly for handling REST and user authentication. But the already existent Erlang MVC frameworks isn’t mature enough and feels like going one step back comparing to frameworks like Codeigniter or Ruby on Rails.

So I’m actually going to code a bittorrent client/daemon. Think of the possibilities! Well it has already been done but I can’t think of a better way to learn Erlang as well as distributed technologies.

Alright, enough ranting. Here’s some installation instructions for Mac OS X Leopard. You’ll need to have Xcode (and libgd?) installed.


$ sudo mkdir /usr/src
$ cd /usr/src
$ sudo curl -L -O http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R12B-5.tar.gz
$ sudo tar zxvf otp_src_R12B-5.tar.gz
$ cd otp_src_R12B-5
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install