Error compiling Ejabberd dependency of a Phoenix application with Mix: could not compile dependency :ejabberd, “mix compile” failed

Question

I have been trying to embed Ejabberd into a Phoenix web application. To do this, I tried to follow this tutorial . The steps were the following:

• Installed a ubuntu/xenial64 Vagrant box.

• Installed Elixir according to the official guide .

• Installed Phoenix according to the official guide .

• Installed some packages to successfully compile the Phoenix' seed app dependencies: sudo apt install build-essential libssl-dev libyaml-cpp-dev libyaml-dev libpython2.7-dev

• I've added the ejabberd dependency to the mix.exs file:

   defmodule PhoenixEjabberd.Mixfile do use Mix.Project def project do [app: :phoenix_ejabberd, version: "0.0.1", elixir: "~> 1.2", elixirc_paths: elixirc_paths(Mix.env), compilers: [:phoenix, :gettext] ++ Mix.compilers, build_embedded: Mix.env == :prod, start_permanent: Mix.env == :prod, aliases: aliases(), deps: deps()] end # Configuration for the OTP application. # # Type `mix help compile.app` for more information. def application do [mod: {PhoenixEjabberd, []}, applications: [:phoenix, :phoenix_pubsub, :phoenix_html, :cowboy, :logger, :ejabberd, :gettext, :phoenix_ecto, :postgrex]] end # Specifies which paths to compile per environment. defp elixirc_paths(:test), do: ["lib", "web", "test/support"] defp elixirc_paths(_), do: ["lib", "web"] # Specifies your project dependencies. # # Type `mix help deps` for examples and options. defp deps do [{:phoenix, "~> 1.2.1"}, {:phoenix_pubsub, "~> 1.0"}, {:phoenix_ecto, "~> 3.0"}, {:postgrex, ">= 0.0.0"}, {:phoenix_html, "~> 2.6"}, {:phoenix_live_reload, "~> 1.0", only: :dev}, {:gettext, "~> 0.11"}, {:cowboy, "~> 1.0"}, {:ejabberd, "~> 16.12", github: "processone/ejabberd"} ] end # Aliases are shortcuts or tasks specific to the current project. # For example, to create, migrate and run the seeds file at once: # # $ mix ecto.setup # # See the documentation for `Mix` for more info on aliases. defp aliases do ["ecto.setup": ["ecto.create", "ecto.migrate", "run priv/repo/seeds.exs"], "ecto.reset": ["ecto.drop", "ecto.setup"], "test": ["ecto.create --quiet", "ecto.migrate", "test"]] end end 

• Executed mix do deps.get, compile

• Got a very large amount of errors, mostly of undefined functions and variables. I put the full log on this Gist .

Why are those errors occurring? Did anyone succeed in compiling the ejabberd dependency? How? Thank you for your time :).

Answer 1

For unknown reason ejabberd fails to compile from the root project folder. To compile it, I did the following:

mix deps.get # to retrieve ejabberd 
cd deps/ejabberd
mix do deps.get, compile
cd - # to the project root
mix compile # now the project would compile