This chapter explains how to setup your system in order to use Erlang.mk.
Erlang.mk requires GNU Make to be installed. GNU Make 3.81 or later is required. GNU Make 4.1 or later is recommended, as this is the version Erlang.mk is developed on.
Some functionality requires that Autoconf 2.59 or later be installed, in order to compile Erlang/OTP. Erlang/OTP may have further requirements depending on your needs.
Erlang.mk currently requires Erlang/OTP to be installed in order to compile Erlang projects.
Some packages may require additional libraries.
Erlang.mk can be used on Windows inside an MSYS2 environment. Cygwin, MSYS (the original) and native Windows (both Batch and PowerShell) are currently not supported.
The rest of this section details how to setup Erlang/OTP and MSYS2 in order to use Erlang.mk.
Erlang.mk requires Erlang/OTP to be installed. The OTP team provides binaries of Erlang/OTP for all major and minor releases, available from the official download page. It is recommended that you use the 64-bit installer unless technically impossible. Please follow the instructions from the installer to complete the installation.
The OTP team also provides a short guide to installing Erlang/OTP on Windows if you need additional references.
You can install Erlang/OTP silently using the /S switch
on the command line:
C:\Users\essen\Downloads> otp_win64_18.0.exe /S
The only supported environment on Windows is MSYS2. MSYS2 is
a lightweight Unix-like environment for Windows that comes
with the Arch Linux package manager, pacman.
The MSYS2 project provides a one click installer and instructions to set things up post-installation.
It is currently not possible to use the installer silently. Thankfully, the MSYS2 project provides an archive that can be used in lieu of the installer. The archive however requires 7zip to decompress it.
First, download the MSYS2 base archive and extract it under C:\. Assuming you downloaded the archive as msys2.tar.xz and put it in C:\, you can use the following commands to extract it:
C:\> 7z x msys2.tar.xz C:\> 7z x msys2.tar > NUL
Then you can run the two commands needed to perform the post-installation setup:
C:\> C:\msys64\usr\bin\bash -lc "pacman --needed --noconfirm -Sy bash pacman pacman-mirrors msys2-runtime" C:\> C:\msys64\usr\bin\bash -lc "pacman --noconfirm -Syu"
After following these instructions, you can install GNU Make,
Git and any other required softwares. From an MSYS2 shell,
you can call pacman directly:
$ pacman -S git make
You can use pacman -Ss to search packages. For example,
to find all packages related to GCC:
$ pacman -Ss gcc
If you are going to compile C/C++ code, you will need to install this package, as Erlang.mk cannot use the normal "gcc" package:
$ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc
You can also run commands under the MSYS2 environment from the Windows command line or batch files. This command will install GNU Make and Git:
C:\> C:\msys64\usr\bin\bash -lc "pacman --noconfirm -S git make"
You can use similar bash commands if you need to run programs
inside the MSYS2 environment from a batch file.
While most of the basic functionality will just work, there are still some issues. Erlang.mk needs to be fixed to pass the right paths when running Erlang scripts. We are working on it. Erlang.mk is fully tested on both Linux and Windows, but is lacking tests in the areas not yet covered by this guide, so expect bugs to be fixed as more tests are added.