Skip to main content

Add pre-compiled Elixir on OS X

So, I've been a big Erlang fan for a few years now, and then found out about Elixir:  what I would describe as kind of a Ruby-ish creamy frosting on top of Erlang. But I'll address more on both in future. Right now, I thought I'd just give a quick and dirty way to add Elixir, if you've already got Erlang installed (hint: check-out this Erlang Solutions link for a pre-compiled Erlang solution).  You can also use brew to install both, but I have found that with the simplicity of brew, you give up having the most current version of software.  In both cases. The pre-compiled zip for the most current version of Elixir can be found here.  Unzipping reveals a folder containing everything you need.  For simplicity's sake, keeping everything pertaining to Elixir all within this folder makes the most sense.  By doing so, all that's needed is to position the folder, and then make links to all the executables in a directory already in our path.  Through the link, the OS will find the program, and everything the program needs (libs and such) are already where it expects to find them (in the folder). Rename the folder to: "Elixir".  The reason I do this is so that I can easily find it later, and just drag the old folder to the trash, replacing it with whatever the current version is (and not have to change any of the links-- drag and drop replacement).
NOTE:  the following assumes that you have "/usr/local/bin" on your path.
Now, move (mv) the newly renamed folder to the directory: "/usr/local/", so that the final directory path is now, "/usr/local/Elixir". Again from the terminal, change directories (cd) to "/usr/local/bin", as it's from here that we're going to set every thing up to play nice. With the current directory in the terminal now, "/usr/local/bin" add the following soft links to each of the Elixir executables (beginning '$' represents the terminal prompt in all examples):

$ ln -s /usr/local/bin/iex  iex

$ ln -s /usr/local/bin/elixir  elixir

$ ln -s /usr/local/bin/elixirc  elixirc

$ ln -s /usr/local/bin/mix  mix
Now, you can double check everything:

$ iex -v
$ elixir -v
$ elixir -v
$ mix -v
Provided everything is set up correctly, and you received version number's from each command, you're ready to rock with Elixir.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Codeigniter vs. Kohana Database access speeds

I was doing some basic profiling for a project in which I needed the fastest raw speed I could get with database queries. I'm a fan of Codeigniter for projects that are suitable for it, but had heard from some that Kohana was faster, so I decided to do a very basic comparison of the two. I was using MAMP for OSX, and created a very small db, with a table that had 3 fields: (id), (first), and (last). The data sample was also very small, only a few records. The basic query I tested was a "SELECT * FROM [table]". There is of course nothing remotely scientific about this. It was just a quick ad dirty, very limited comparison. Take it as such. Versions used: CI2.1.3, Kohana 3.3.0. Codeigniter I really like Codeigniter (CI). But, one thing that is very evident from their own profiling functions, is that CI is a bit of a memory hog! Essentially, the same Controller function running in CI takes approximately 10X more memory than in Kohana! This in itself is not ...

Dead Simple React.js with Meteor

I spent a little time exploring the patterns involved in using React.js with Meteor. It's incredibly easy, it turns out. I'll show some examples here. The setup: meteor add kadira:flow-router npm install react react-dom react-mounter npm install react-addons-pure-render-mixin meteor add react-meteor-data Then of course remove all blaze related meteor packages. Ok, Some basic component patterns: Let's create one that accepts a single argument: Hello.jsx import React from 'react'; export const Hello = ({name}) => ( <div>Hello, {name}</div> ); That's all there is to it. Now, let's see a pattern for a component that takes two arguments. We can see that to add further arguments, we can just tack them on after the first two: TwoArgs.jsx import React from 'react'; export const TwoArgs = ({one, two}) => ( <div> <h2>TwoArgs!</h2> <h3>One is: {one}</h3> <h3>Two is: {two}...

Fun with Meteor, React, and React-Bootstrap

React-Bootstrap is pretty cool. I decided to play with it a bit.  Here are the basics. In an already set up Meteor project (set up for React), it is added thus: npm install --save react-bootstrap Once this is done, you also need to add a bootstrap library. It could either be the twitter bootstrap meteor package, or you can link to it. For the purpose of my demo, I just grabbed a couple links from the React-Bootstrap site that they had handy for pulling in from a CMS: index.html <head> <!-- Latest compiled and minified CSS --> <link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/latest/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"> </link> <!-- Optional theme --> <link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/latest/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css" rel="stylesheet"> </link> </head> Now, let's make a layout, and then create a component tha...