Installing LFE

Dependencies

In order to install LFE, you'll need to make sure you have the prerequisites installed. These include:

  • Erlang itself
  • make and related developer tools
  • git

Erlang

First and foremost, you will need Erlang installed.

  • On Mac OS X, this is as easy as executing brew install erlang
  • On Ubuntu apt-get install erlang.

You can also install Erlang from the various pre-built packages provided on the official Erlang download page or from the Erlang Solutions page (which supports many more package types).

For those who have the need of installing multiple versions of Erlang, there is also the kerl project.

make

In order to use LFE, you will be calling make to compile it. To cover your bases, you'll want to make sure you have the basic development tools installed for your platform.

Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

CentOS/Fedora:

$ sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

For Mac OS X, you will need to install the "Developer Tools" from the AppStore.

git

You will also need git to continue with this quick-start. If git doesn't come installed on your system and it wansn't installed as part of your systems basic development tools package, you can download it here or install it using your favourite OS package manager.

Getting and Compiling LFE

The most recent version of LFE is always available here:

With git and erl in your $PATH, let's download LFE and the compile it:

$ git clone https://github.com/rvirding/lfe.git
$ cd lfe
$ make

LFE is just a set of Erlang libraries, so like an Erlang project, the source code needs to be compiled to .beam files. Running make in the lfe directory will do that. At which point, everything is ready to go!