Lately, I’ve discovered Elixir, a functional programming language. Its syntax is very clean, and it’s quite enjoyable to explore a new paradigm. I believe that every programmer should establish a workflow for familiarizing themselves with a new language and i recommend to install Elixir throw asdf, a tool version manager.

Note that this is not official documentation; it’s a simple walkthrough and check the documentation if you have time.

Installation with asdf

Assuming you have installed asdf following the official instruction: Try

> asfd --version

v0.13.1-0586b37

Now you can install Elixir and Erlang throw this tool version manager

Installing Erlang

Ensure you have the dependencies required for this installation. Please read the “Before asdf install” section in the repository.

To avoid annoying warnings in the VSCode ElixirLS extension, I recommend setting this variable in either your .bashrc file or in the current terminal session.

export KERL_BUILD_DOCS=yes
export KERL_INSTALL_HTMLDOCS=yes
export KERL_INSTALL_MANPAGES=yes

To avoid warnings in VSCode and streamline the process, make sure to set these three environment variables. Once configured, you can proceed with the Erlang installation smoothly.

asdf plugin add erlang https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-erlang.git

asdf install erlang <version>

I install the latest version but this is up to you. Mine command is:

asdf install erlang latest

Now the latest command to make the command available on the shell:

asdf local erlang <version>

Installing Elixir

I recommend always checking the required dependencies. In this case, it is necessary to have Erlang already installed and unzip. Please refer to the repository.

asdf install elixir <version>-otp-<version-otp>

The <version-otp> should be the version installed, if you have 26 installed replace with 26.

Mine is:

asdf install elixir 1.16.0-otp-26