Please read the whole file before attempting to build and install Erlang/OTP. You can find more information about Open Source Erlang/OTP at:
The source code for Erlang/OTP can also be found in a Git repository:
Erlang/OTP should be possible to build from source on any Unix system, including Mac OS X. This document describes how to native compile Erlang/OTP on Unix. For detailed instructions on how to
cross compile Erlang/OTP, see the $ERL_TOP/INSTALL-CROSS.md
document.
build Erlang/OTP on Windows, see the $ERL_TOP/INSTALL-WIN32.md
document.
Binary releases for Windows can be found at http://www.erlang.org/download.html.
However, you are in any case advised to read this document first, since it covers building Erlang/OTP in general as well as other important information.
At Ericsson we have a "Daily Build and Test" that runs on:
We also have the following "Daily Cross Builds":
and the following "Daily Cross Build Tests":
Suse linux 9.1 is shipped with a patched GCC version 3.3.3, having the
rpm named gcc-3.3.3-41. That version has a serious optimization bug
that makes it unusable for building the Erlang emulator. Please
upgrade GCC to a newer version before building on Suse 9.1. Suse Linux
Enterprise edition 9 (SLES9) has gcc-3.3.3-43 and is not affected.
gcc-4.3.0 has a serious optimizer bug. It produces an Erlang emulator
that will crash immediately. The bug is supposed to be fixed in
gcc-4.3.1.
FreeBSD had a bug which caused kqueue/poll/select to fail to detect
that a writev() on a pipe has been made. This bug should have been fixed
in FreeBSD 6.3 and FreeBSD 7.0. NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD probably have or
have had the same bug. More information can be found at:
getcwd() on Solaris 9 can cause an emulator crash. If you have
async-threads enabled you can increase the stack size of the
async-threads as a temporary workaround. See the +a command-line
argument in the documentation of erl(1). Without async-threads the
emulator is not as vulnerable to this bug, but if you hit it without
async-threads the only workaround available is to enable async-threads
and increase the stack size of the async-threads. Sun has however
released patches that fixes the issue:
Problem Description: 6448300 large mnttab can cause stack overrun during Solaris 9 getcwd
More information can be found at:
These are the tools you will need in order to unpack and build Erlang/OTP.
ssl and crypto. You need the "development package" of OpenSSL, i.e.
including the header files. For building the application ssl the OpenSSL
binary command program openssl is also needed. At least version 0.9.7
of OpenSSL is required. Can be downloaded from http://www.openssl.org.jinterface and parts of ic and orber. Can
be downloaded from http://java.sun.com. We have also tested IBM's
JDK 1.5.0.gs on Unix/Linux.sed -- There seem to be some problems with some of the sed version on
Solaris. Make sure /bin/sed or /usr/bin/sed is used on the Solaris
platform.megaco application on Unix/Linux.If you are building in a Git working directory you also have to have a GNU
autoconf of at least version 2.59. Autoconf is however not needed if you
build an unmodified version of the released source.
xsltproc -- XSLT processor. A tool for applying XSLT stylesheets
to XML documents. Can be downloaded from
http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/xsltproc2.html.fop -- Apache FOP print formatter (requires Java). Can be downloaded from
http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop.Markdown.pl -- Optional. This is a perl script that generates an
HTML version of a document written in Markdown notation. Can be
downloaded at http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown.install program that can take multiple file names.The following instructions are for building using the source tar ball.
The variable $ERL_TOP will be mentioned a lot of times. It refers to
the top directory in the source tree. More information about $ERL_TOP
can be found in the "make and $ERL_TOP" section below. If you are
building in git you probably want to take a look at the "Building in Git"
section below before proceeding.
Step 1: Start by unpacking the Erlang/OTP distribution file with your GNU compatible TAR program.
$ gunzip -c otp_src_R13B04.tar.gz | tar xf -
$ zcat otp_src_R13B04.tar.gz | tar xf -
Step 2: Now cd into the base directory ($ERL_TOP).
$ cd otp_src_R13B04
Step 3: On some platforms Perl may behave strangely if certain locales are set, so optionally you may need to set the LANG variable:
# Bourne shell
$ LANG=C; export LANG
or
# C-Shell
$ setenv LANG C
Step 4: Run the following commands to configure the build:
$ ./configure [ options ]
By default, Erlang/OTP will be installed in /usr/local/{bin,lib/erlang}.
To instead install in <BaseDir>/{bin,lib/erlang}, use the
--prefix=<BaseDir> option.
If you upgraded the source with some patch you may need to clean up
from previous builds before the new build. Do a make clean; see
"Caveats" below.
Step 5: Build the Erlang/OTP package.
$ make
Step 6: Install then Erlang/OTP package
$ make install
Let us go through them in some detail.
Step 4 runs a configuration script created by the GNU autoconf utility, which checks for system specific features and then creates a number of makefiles.
The configure script allows you to customize a number of parameters;
type ./configure --help or ./configure --help=recursive for details.
./configure --help=recursive will give help for all configure scripts in
all applications.
One of the things you can specify is where Erlang/OTP should be installed: by
default Erlang/OTP will be installed in /usr/local/{bin,lib/erlang};
to keep the same structure but install in a different place, <Dir> say,
use the --prefix argument like this: ./configure --prefix=<Dir>.
Some of the available configure options are:
--prefix=PATH: Specify installation prefix.--{enable,disable}-threads: Thread support (enabled by default if
possible)--{enable,disable}-smp-support: SMP support (enabled by default if
possible)--{enable,disable}-kernel-poll: Kernel poll support (enabled by default
if possible)--{enable,disable}-hipe: HiPE support (enabled by default on supported
platforms)--enable-darwin-universal: Build universal binaries on darwin i386.--enable-darwin-64bit: Build 64bit binaries on darwin--enable-m64-build: Build 64bit binaries using the -m64 flag to (g)cc--enable-m32-build: Build 32bit binaries using the -m32 flag to (g)cc--{with,without}-termcap: termcap (without implies that only the old
Erlang shell can be used)--with-javac=JAVAC: Specify Java compiler to use--{with,without}-javac: Java compiler (without implies that the
jinterface application won't be built).--{enable,disable}-dynamic-ssl-lib: Dynamic OpenSSL libraries--{enable,disable}-shared-zlib: Shared zlib library--with-ssl=PATH: Specify location of OpenSSL include and lib--{with,without}-ssl: OpenSSL (without implies that the crypto, ssh,
and ssl won't be built)If you or your system has special requirements please read the Makefile for additional configuration information.
Step 5 builds the Erlang/OTP system. On a fast computer, this will take about
5 minutes. After completion of this step, you should have a working
Erlang/OTP system which you can try by typing bin/erl. This should start
up Erlang/OTP and give you a prompt.
Step 6 is optional. It installs Erlang/OTP at a standardized location (if you change your mind about where you wish to install you can rerun step 4, without having to do step 5 again).
Staged install using DESTDIR. You can perform the install
phase in a temporary directory and later move the installation into
its correct location by use of the DESTDIR variable:
$ make DESTDIR=<tmp install dir> install
The installation will be created in a location prefixed by $DESTDIR.
It can, however, not be run from there. It needs to be moved into the
correct location before it can be run. If DESTDIR have not been set
but INSTALL_PREFIX has been set, DESTDIR will be set to
INSTALL_PREFIX. Note that INSTALL_PREFIX in pre R13B04 was buggy
and behaved as EXTRA_PREFIX (see below). There are lots of areas of
use for an installation procedure using DESTDIR, e.g. when creating
a package, cross compiling, etc. Here is an example where the
installation should be located under /opt/local:
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/local
$ make
$ make DESTDIR=/tmp/erlang-build install
$ cd /tmp/erlang-build/opt/local
$ # gnu-tar is used in this example
$ tar -zcf /home/me/my-erlang-build.tgz *
$ su -
Password: *****
$ cd /opt/local
$ tar -zxf /home/me/my-erlang-build.tgz
Install using the release target. Instead of doing make install you
can create the installation in whatever directory you like using the
release target and run the Install script yourself. RELEASE_ROOT
is used for specifying the directory where the installation should be
created. This is what by default ends up under /usr/local/lib/erlang
if you do the install using make install. All installation paths
provided in the configure phase are ignored, as well as DESTDIR,
and INSTALL_PREFIX. If you want links from a specific bin directory
to the installation you have to set those up yourself. An example where
Erlang/OTP should be located at /home/me/OTP:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make RELEASE_ROOT=/home/me/OTP release
$ cd /home/me/OTP
$ ./Install -minimal /home/me/OTP
$ mkdir -p /home/me/bin
$ cd /home/me/bin
$ ln -s /home/me/OTP/bin/erl erl
$ ln -s /home/me/OTP/bin/erlc erlc
$ ln -s /home/me/OTP/bin/escript escript
...
The Install script should currently be invoked as follows in the
directory where it resides (the top directory):
$ ./Install [-cross] [-minimal|-sasl] <ERL_ROOT>
where:
-minimal Creates an installation that starts up a minimal amount
of applications, i.e., only kernel and stdlib are started. The
minimal system is normally enough, and is what make install uses.-sasl Creates an installation that also starts up the sasl
application.-cross For cross compilation. Informs the install script that it
is run on the build machine.<ERL_ROOT> - The absolute path to the Erlang installation to use
at run time. This is often the same as the current working directory,
but does not have to be. It can follow any other path through the
file system to the same directory.If neither -minimal, nor -sasl is passed as argument you will be
prompted.
Test install using EXTRA_PREFIX. The content of the EXTRA_PREFIX
variable will prefix all installation paths when doing make install.
Note that EXTRA_PREFIX is similar to DESTDIR, but it does not have
the same effect as DESTDIR. The installation can and have to be run
from the location specified by EXTRA_PREFIX. That is, it can be useful
if you want to try the system out, running test suites, etc, before doing
the real install without EXTRA_PREFIX.
--bindirWhen doing make install and the default installation prefix is used,
relative symbolic links will be created from /usr/local/bin to all public
Erlang/OTP executables in /usr/local/lib/erlang/bin. The installation phase
will try to create relative symbolic links as long as --bindir and the
Erlang bin directory, located under --libdir, both have --exec-prefix as
prefix. Where --exec-prefix defaults to --prefix. --prefix,
--exec-prefix, --bindir, and --libdir are all arguments that can be
passed to configure. One can force relative, or absolute links by passing
BINDIR_SYMLINKS=relative|absolute as arguments to make during the install
phase. Note that such a request might cause a failure if the request cannot
be satisfied.
When building in a Git working directory you also have to have a GNU autoconf
of at least version 2.59 on your system. This since you need to generate the
configure scripts before you can start building.
The configure scripts are generated by invoking ./otp_build autoconf in
the $ERL_TOP directory. The configure scripts also have to be regenerated
when a configure.in or aclocal.m4 file has been modified. Note that when
checking out a branch a configure.in or aclocal.m4 file may change
content, and you may therefore have to regenerate the configure scripts
when checking out a branch. Regenerated configure scripts imply that you
have to run configure and build again.
Note that running ./otp_build autoconf is not needed when building an
unmodified version the released source.
Other useful information can be found at our github wiki: http://wiki.github.com/erlang/otp
The source tree is delivered with a lot of platform independent
build results already pre-built. If you want to remove these pre-built
files, invoke ./otp_build remove_prebuilt_files from the $ERL_TOP
directory. After you have done this, you can build exactly the same way
as before, but the build process will take a much longer time.
NOTE: Doing make clean in an arbitrary directory of the source tree,
may remove files needed for bootstrapping the build. Doing
./otp_build save_bootstrap from the $ERL_TOP directory before
doing make clean will ensure that it will be possible to build after
doing make clean. ./otp_build save_bootstrap will be invoked
automatically when make is invoked from $ERL_TOP with either the
clean target, or the default target. It is also automatically invoked
if ./otp_build remove_prebuilt_files is invoked.
make and $ERL_TOPAll the makefiles in the entire directory tree use the environment
variable ERL_TOP to find the absolute path of the installation. The
configure script will figure this out and set it in the top level
Makefile (which, when building, it will pass on). However, when
developing it is sometimes convenient to be able to run make in a
subdirectory. To do this you must set the ERL_TOP variable
before you run make.
For example, assume your GNU make program is called make and you
want to rebuild the application STDLIB, then you could do:
$ cd lib/stdlib; env ERL_TOP=<Dir> make
where <Dir> would be what you find ERL_TOP is set to in the top level
Makefile.
$ cd $ERL_TOP
If you have just built Erlang/OTP in the current source tree, you have
already ran configure and do not need to do this again; otherwise, run
configure.
$ ./configure [Configure Args]
When building the documentation you need a full Erlang/OTP-R13B04 system in
the $PATH.
$ export PATH=<Erlang/OTP-R13B04 bin dir>:$PATH # Assuming bash/sh
This document as well as some other documents have been written using
Markdown notation. HTML versions of these documents are created and included
in the HTML documentation if the environment variable MD2HTML is set to a
command that generates HTML on stdout for a Markdown document passed as
argument. This is a last minute hack, which will be handled in a better way
in the future. We currently set MD2HTML as follows.
$ export MD2HTML="perl <path to script>/Markdown.pl --html4tags"
Build the documentation.
$ make docs
The documentation can be installed either using the install-docs target,
or using the release_docs target.
If you have installed Erlang/OTP using the install target, install
the documentation using the install-docs target. Install locations
determined by configure will be used. $DESTDIR can be used the
same way as when doing make install.
$ make install-docs
If you have installed Erlang/OTP using the release target, install
the documentation using the release_docs target. You typically want
to use the same RELEASE_ROOT as when invoking make release.
$ make release_docs RELEASE_ROOT=<release dir>
We have sometimes experienced problems with suns java running out of
memory when running fop. Increasing the amount of memory available
as follows has in our case solved the problem.
$ export FOP_OPTS="-Xmx<Installed amount of RAM in MB>m"
More information can be found at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.95/running.html#memory.
Pre-formatted documentation can be downloaded at http://www.erlang.org/download.html.
For some graphical tools to find the on-line help you have to install the HTML documentation on top of the installed OTP applications, i.e.
$ cd <ReleaseDir>
$ gunzip -c otp_html_R13B04.tar.gz | tar xf -
For erl -man <page> to work the Unix manual pages have to be
installed in the same way, i.e.
$ cd <ReleaseDir>
$ gunzip -c otp_man_R13B04.tar.gz | tar xf -
Where <ReleaseDir> is
<PrefixDir>/lib/erlang if you have installed Erlang/OTP using
make install.$DESTDIR<PrefixDir>/lib/erlang if you have installed Erlang/OTP
using make install DESTDIR=<TmpInstallDir>.RELEASE_ROOT if you have installed using
make release RELEASE_ROOT=<ReleaseDir>.An emulator with SMP support will be built by default on most platforms if a usable POSIX thread library or native Windows threads is found.
You can force building of an SMP emulator, by using
./configure --enable-smp-support. However, if configure does not
automatically enable SMP support, the build is very likely to fail.
Use ./configure --disable-smp-support if you for some reason do not
want to have the emulator with SMP support built.
If SMP support is enabled, support for threaded I/O will also be turned on (also in the emulator without SMP support).
The erl command will automatically start the SMP emulator if the
computer has more than one logical processor. You can force a start
of the emulator with SMP support by passing -smp enable as
command line arguments to erl, and you can force a start of the
emulator without SMP support by passing -smp disable.
GS now Tcl/Tk 8.4. It will be searched for when starting GS.
HiPE supports the following system configurations:
x86: All 32-bit and 64-bit mode processors should work.
Linux: Fedora Core is supported. Both 32-bit and 64-bit modes are supported.
NPTL glibc is strongly preferred, or a LinuxThreads glibc configured for "floating stacks". Old non-floating stacks glibcs have a fundamental problem that makes HiPE support and threads support mutually exclusive.
Solaris: Solaris 10 (32-bit and 64-bit) and 9 (32-bit) are supported. The build requires a version of the GNU C compiler (gcc) that has been configured to use the GNU assembler (gas). Sun's x86 assembler is emphatically not supported.
FreeBSD: FreeBSD 6.1 and 6.2 in 32-bit and 64-bit modes should work.
MacOSX/Darwin: Darwin 9.8.0 in 32-bit mode should work.
PowerPC: All 32-bit 6xx/7xx(G3)/74xx(G4) processors should work. 32-bit mode on 970 (G5) and POWER5 processors should work.
SPARC: All UltraSPARC processors running 32-bit user code should work.
Solaris 9 is supported. The build requires a gcc that has been
configured to use Sun's assembler and linker. Using the GNU assembler
but Sun's linker has been known to cause problems.
Linux (Aurora) is supported.
ARM: ARMv5TE (i.e. XScale) processors should work. Both big-endian and little-endian modes are supported.
HiPE is automatically enabled on the following systems:
On other supported systems you need to ./configure --enable-hipe.
If you are running on a platform supporting HiPE and if you have not disabled HiPE, you can compile a module into native code like this from the Erlang shell:
1> c(Module, native).
or
1> c(Module, [native|OtherOptions]).
Using the erlc program, write like this:
$ erlc +native Module.erl
The native code will be placed into the beam file and automatically loaded when the beam file is loaded.
To add hipe options, write like this from the Erlang shell:
1> c(Module, [native,{hipe,HipeOptions}|MoreOptions]).
Use hipe:help_options/0 to print out the available options.
1> hipe:help_options().
We test Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger) and Mac OS X 10.5.x (Leopard) in our daily builds (but only on Intel processors).
Make sure that the command hostname returns a valid fully qualified host
name (this is configured in /etc/hostconfig).
If you develop linked-in drivers (shared library) you need to link using
gcc and the flags -bundle -flat_namespace -undefined suppress. You also
include -fno-common in CFLAGS when compiling. Use .so as the library
suffix.
Universal 32bit binaries can be built on an Intel Mac using the
--enable-darwin-universal configure option. There still may occur
problems with certain applications using this option, but the base
system should run smoothly.
When building universal binaries on a PowerPC Mac (at least on Tiger), you must point out a suitable SDK that contains universal binaries. For instance, to build universal binaries for Tiger (10.4):
$ CFLAGS="-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk" \
LDFLAGS="-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk" \
./configure --enable-darwin-universal
Also, if you run Leopard, but want to build for Tiger, you must do by
setting the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environmental variable.
$ export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4
Experimental support for 64bit x86 darwin binaries can be enabled
using the --enable-darwin-64bit configure flag. The 64bit binaries are
best built and run on Leopard, but most of the system also works on
Tiger (Tiger's 64bit libraries are, however, limited; therefore e.g. odbc,
crypto, ssl etc. are not supported in Tiger). 64bit PPC binaries are not
supported and we have no plans to add such support (no machines to
test on).
Universal binaries and 64bit binaries are mutually exclusive options.
After completing all the normal building steps described above a debug
enabled runtime system can be built. To do this you have to change
directory to $ERL_TOP/erts/emulator.
In this directory execute:
$ make debug FLAVOR=$FLAVOR
where $FLAVOR is either plain or smp. The flavor options will
produce a beam.debug and beam.smp.debug executable respectively. The
files are installed along side with the normal (opt) versions beam.smp
and beam.
To start the debug enabled runtime system execute:
$ $ERL_TOP/bin/cerl -debug
The debug enabled runtime system features lock violation checking, assert checking and various sanity checks to help a developer ensure correctness. Some of these features can be enabled on a normal beam using appropriate configure options.
There are other types of runtime systems that can be built as well using the similar steps just described.
$ make $TYPE FLAVOR=$FLAVOR
where $TYPE is opt, gcov, gprof, debug, valgrind, or lcnt.
These different beam types are useful for debugging and profiling
purposes.
Authors are mostly listed in the application's AUTHORS files,
that is $ERL_TOP/lib/*/AUTHORS and $ERL_TOP/erts/AUTHORS,
not in the individual source files.
%CopyrightBegin%
Copyright Ericsson AB 1998-2010. All Rights Reserved.
The contents of this file are subject to the Erlang Public License, Version 1.1, (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You should have received a copy of the Erlang Public License along with this software. If not, it can be retrieved online at http://www.erlang.org/.
Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing rights and limitations under the License.
%CopyrightEnd%
More information can be found at http://www.erlang.org.