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 through the step by step installation Erlang in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus.
Install Erlang on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Installing Erlang.
First, download Erlang repository package from its official website and install 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 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 hello world program on erlang. First create file helloworld.erl with 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 below command:
erlc helloworld.erl
Now, run your program using below command:
erl -noshell -s helloworld start -s init stop
Congratulation’s! 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 web site.