Recently I have been curious about the Elixir language and its benefits..

As the title says, today I am going to show you how we can easily set up an Elixir/Erlang development environment on Ubuntu (precisely 14.04).

Installing Erlang

Elixir is built on top of Erlang virtual machine, this way, we need to install Erlang first.

Let's start by installing its dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses5-dev openssl libssl-dev fop xsltproc unixodbc-dev

Now, let's download Erlang's source code, compile and install it. You can check out the latest versions of Erlang in its own website.

cd /usr/bin
wget http://erlang.org/download/otp_src_17.1.tar.gz
tar -xzvf otp_src_17.1.tar.gz
cd otp_src_17.1
sudo ./configure && sudo make && sudo make install

After installation, type erl to enter Erlang console.

Installing Elixir

Let's install the latest stable version of Elixir (check out on github).

cd /usr/bin
sudo git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir
cd elixir
sudo git checkout v0.15.1
sudo make && sudo make install

Ok, now we have Elixir v0.15 installed, just type iex to enter Interactive Elixir shell.

Have fun!