How To Install Erlang on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Erlang on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. 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 in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04.
• 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 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Erlang.

First, download the Erlang repository package from its official website and install it on your system:

wget https://packages.erlang-solutions.com/erlang-solutions_1.0_all.deb 
dpkg -i erlang-solutions_1.0_all.deb

Now, you can install the erlang package on your system using the following command:

apt-get update
apt-get install erlang

Step 3. Erlang Hello World Program.

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

nano helloworld.erl

Add the following content:

% hello world program
-module(helloworld).
-export([start/0]).
start() ->
io:fwrite("Hello World!\n").

Compile the hello world program using the below command:

erlc helloworld.erl

 Now, run your program using the below command:

erl -noshell -s helloworld start -s init stop

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Erlang. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Erlang on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Erlang website.

Save

Save