Installing Erlang on OS X
February 16th, 2008 Posted in Erlang, OS X, web integration
I have been really interested in Erlang since I first read about it on Ted’s blog post about “Why Erlang?”. I picked up Joe Armstrong’s book “Programming Erlang” and during the install I about pulled out all my hair. The issue was that after I ran the sudo make install command after the build completed nothing happened when I called erl from the terminal. Pulling out my Google Kung Fu did nothing. I couldn’t find anyone that had the same problem with installing Erlang.
The problem was actually not Erlang, but how bash was configured. The bash client I had for my terminal did not have the path configured for where make was installing the compiled code. I found this out when I went down the path of trying to install MacPorts on my box. After their installer ran I had the same error in terminal. At this point I realized it was system configuration issue and not application specific. Luckily Garrick Van Buren had the same kind of issue with MacPorts and his bash client. His tip let me to search where the bin directory path was set with the env command and this is what made all the difference. I moved the built code over to a mapped bin and this fixed the issue.
I wanted to post this in-case anyone else stumbles onto this issue with any install such as Erlang. Now that it is installed I am off to dig into the new language.
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