How To Install Erlang on CentOS 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Erlang on CentOS 8.  For those of you who didn’t know, Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements for high availability. The Erlang runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Erlang on CentOS 8.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Erlang on CentOS 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date and install all required dependencies.

sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf update

Step 2. Installing Erlang on CentOS 8.

Erlang packages are available in Github, Now we download the RPM package using wget the command-line tool:

wget https://github.com/rabbitmq/erlang-rpm/releases/download/v23.1.5/erlang-23.1.5-1.el8.x86_64.rpm

Then, install Erlang using the following command:

sudo dnf install erlang-23.1.5-1.el8.x86_64.rpm

Confirm installation by running the erl command:

erl

Step 3. Erlang Hello World Program.

Let’s start with a hello world program on Erlang. First, create a file Hello.erl with the following content:

nano hello.erl

Add the following content:

% This is a test Hello World Erlang Code
-module(hello).
-import(io,[fwrite/1]).
-export([helloworld/0]).

helloworld() ->
   fwrite("Hello, Erlang World!\n").

Compile it from the Erlang shell. Don’t forget the full-stop (“period“) at the end of each command:

2> hello:helloworld().
Hello, Erlang World!
ok

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Erlang. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Erlang programming language on your CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Erlang website.