OpenSSL and Elixir

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 12:41:00 +0000

If you’re using the latest OpenSSL package from Homebrew, you might come across an error similar to this one from time to time:

==> fast_tls (compile)
Compiled src/fast_tls_app.erl
Compiled src/p1_sha.erl
Compiled src/fast_tls_sup.erl
Compiled src/fast_tls.erl
Compiling c_src/fast_tls_drv.c
c_src/fast_tls_drv.c:21:10: fatal error: 'openssl/err.h' file not found
#include <openssl/err.h>
         ^
1 error generated.
ERROR: compile failed while processing /Users/john/Public/fap/api/api-2.1/deps/fast_tls: rebar_abort
==> api
\* (Mix) Could not compile dependency :fast_tls, "/Users/john/.asdf/installs/elixir/1.2.3/.mix/rebar compile skip_deps=true deps_dir="/Users/john/Public/fap/api/api-2.1/_build/dev/lib"" command failed. You can recompile this dependency with "mix deps.compile fast_tls", update it with "mix deps.update fast_tls" or clean it with "mix deps.clean fast_tls"

The reason why this error is happening is because OpenSSL header files required to compile this (in this case) rebar module are in homebrew’s /usr/local/opt directory. We can simply fix this by setting LDFLAGS and CFLAGS before compiling:

Elixir/Erlang and autoscaled EC2 servers - how to make them best buddies

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 02:22:00 +0000

At Find a Player, we’ve been trying to figure out how we want to cluster our Elixir servers - so that they can share state between each other - recently. Because we come from ruby (ie, not a high-availability background), when we want to discover other machines in a network we’d traditionally use something like Consul - of which I wrote a ruby library called Diplomat (which admittedly needs some love).

However, after chatting with Gordon Guthrie - a guy who’s been working with Erlang for over 13 years - over twitter, he told us to checkout :net_adm.world/0. Which does pretty much exactly what we want, straight out of the box.

Elixir on John Hamelink

OpenSSL and Elixir

Elixir/Erlang and autoscaled EC2 servers - how to make them best buddies