Installing Erlang to use Phoenix and Erlang packages “not installable” on Ubuntu

Question

I have elixir working and I am trying to run a phoenix server.

Everything works fine until I need to run the server doing mix phx.server and I get this error:

Compiling 1 file (.yrl)
/usr/lib/erlang/lib/parsetools-2.1.8/include/yeccpre.hrl: no such file or directory
could not compile dependency :gettext, "mix compile" failed. You can recompile this dependency with "mix deps.compile gettext", update it with "mix deps.update gettext" or clean it with "mix deps.clean gettext"

Installing parsetools just gives me more errors.

If I try to install Erlang doing this:

sudo apt install esl-erlang

I get:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 esl-erlang : Depends: libncurses5 but it is not installable
              Depends: libwxbase2.8-0 but it is not installable or
                       libwxbase3.0-0 but it is not installable or
                       libwxbase3.0-0v5 but it is not installable
              Depends: libwxgtk2.8-0 but it is not installable or
                       libwxgtk3.0-0 but it is not installable or
                       libwxgtk3.0-0v5 but it is not installable or
                       libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-0v5 but it is not installable
              Depends: libsctp1 but it is not installable
              Recommends: erlang-mode but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I don't know where to go at that point.

Answer 1

The painless way to install OTP on linux machines would be to use packages provided by Erlang Solutions .

Remove everything installed in apt search erlang and follow the instructions on the page I linked under “Installation using repository.”