[Elixir Tip] If you have an older MacOS (Mojave) and asdf erlang fails, do this

November 16, 2021 • Seungjin Kim
[Elixir Tip] If you have an older MacOS (Mojave) and asdf erlang fails, do this

Leaving this here in case anyone is like me,

using an old macOS and don’t really care for updating to a new OS.

I have Mojave. I’m happy with it. I watched as people agonized over Catalina. I was happy until this error popped up when I tried to update erlang via asdf:

https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-erlang/issues/101

And that was the start of a very agonizing weekend.

Every single recommended method wouldn’t work.

The main reason is that XCode or Big Sur update changed location of glu.h, which is like an OpenGL library - that wxWidgets needs.

What does erlang have to do with wxWidgets?

Good question! It is because to render the Observer and the debugging GUI:

https://www.erlang.org/doc/man/observer.html#:~:text=Observer%20is%20a%20graphical%20tool,Erlang%20tracing%20with%20module%20ttb.

Well, I’m not an Erlang guru (yet) and I think Phoenix LiveDashboard has enough output that I don’t need the Observer.

I’ve never actually opened it up to do any debugging.

Sorry babbling on and on. Here’s what I did to DISABLE wx, thus disabling Observer in erlang, when using asdf to install:

  1. Install XCode for your MacOS. Mine was Xcode 11.3.1 (https://developer.apple.com/download/all/?q=11.3 has all the older XCode). Yeah! It’s freagging 7 GIGS!!!

    1. No you can’t just install Command Line Tools for Xcode. I tried. No bueno. :(

  2. Follow what this post does: https://github.com/kerl/kerl/issues/386#issue-1050365520

    1. Specifically:

    export KERL_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS="–with-ssl=brew --prefix [email protected]
    --without-wx
    --without-javac"

  3. And then install asdf:

    1. asdf install erlang 24.1.5

I almost cried. It got installed!

Oh my gosh. I already bought a new SSD and was getting ready to upgrade to Big Sur.

Why a new SSD? Stupid Big Sur won’t install, complaining I have disk issues. Sensitive little bastard. I’d remove Observer anyday. Small price to pay to not having to do a full backup of my Mac into new SSD, install Big Sur into new SSD, and then swap it out in my laptop by unscrewing + taking out the old one …. ew