Unofficial Erlang Binaries

What is this?

gleam-community provides a dependency-free distribution of Erlang/OTP for Linux. This makes it extremely easy to install and distribute, especially when building releases. Head to Releases to download the latest (or older) versions!

Variants

We provide 3 variants for each OTP release, depending on which flavour of the C standard librar libc your distribution uses:

• -glibc: glibc is the most commonly used libc flavour. Glibc is the basis for almost all popular distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Fedora, RHEL, OpenSUSE, and many more.

• -musl: musl is a lightweight alternative to glibc used in distributations like Alpine or Void Linux.

• static (no suffix): The statically linked variant has zero external dependencies and works regardless of distributation or libc flavour. It can run even in environments like NixOS or from scratch containers. Unfortunately, statically linking makes using NIFs and driver plugins impossible; see below for more information.

What is included?

All variants statically link with ncurses, OpenSSL and zlib, which means they work out-of-the-box on any Linux system. They make almost all of OTP available, except for the following applications:

• jinterface
• odbc
• wx and dependents: debugger and observer. Note that et and reltool also include modules that require wx; these will not work.

Documentation and examples are removed. Refer to the online documentation instead.

Additionally, the archive includes a prebuilt version of rebar3. The installed packages on the build system are written into a file called versions.txt that is included in the archive.

Usage

Download the right variant in the latest version from the Releases page. The tarball does not include a top-level directory; this has been done to be compatible with Erlang/OTPs official releases. Once extracted, you will find all the files and directories included in the Erlang installation directory, typically inside /usr/local/lib/erlang. You can copy the files there, but you can also directly run the ./bin/erl program from anywhere to enter an Erlang shell.

# Download the latest version
wget $RELEASE_URL

# Create a target directory
mkdir erlang

# Extract downloaded archive into that directory
tar -xf erlang-*.tar.gz -C erlang/

# Run an Erlang shell!
./erlang/bin/erl

What about NIFs?

Unfortunately, there is no supported way to load dynamic libraries from a static binary on Linux. The dynamically linked variants for glibc and musl can be used instead (see above for more information).

Once you start using NIFs it's maybe also a good time to start considering using a "full" Erlang installation, or finding an alternative by using pure Erlang libraries, ports, or C nodes.

While I have some ideas on how to possibly support odbc in the future, wxWidgets will most likely never be supported. If you're looking for an an alternative to observer, spectator or Phoenix LiveDashboard can be used instead.

Windows and MacOS

The official Windows and Mac binaries provided by Erlang already have no extra dependencies. You can also install them using various package managers like Homebrew or Chocolatey.