Introduction

The meta-erlang layer is able to make a specific tarball having the following tools installed:

• Erlang
• Elixir
• Gleam
• rebar3
• erlfmt
• elvis
• exdoc
• erlang-ls
• concuerror
• livebook

We call this selected list of application as beamtools.

The current beamtools approach is to install a full Erlang and Elixir version. That means all tools not only for running but also for developing BEAM application will be installed.

Our focus with beamtools is to provide a safe environment for developing and running BEAM based applications without installing any OS package.

It is more towards improving the development experience. Moreover, it is an alternative way for running Erlang and/or Elixir version on Linux hosts that does not have package management for installing Erlang and Elixir OS packages. Or when the host does not provide the needed Erlang and Elixir versions.

beamtools builds all the listed tools natively, wrapping them into a tarball self-installed script and ready to be shared. It does not provides any way to cross-compile code. The aim is to provide a custom set of BEAM tools able to be run on any Linux distribution.

For building your own beamtools version, there is a guide explaning the basic steps here.