How to uninstall or upgrade Erlang/OTP?

Question

How can I uninstall Erlang/OTP which I use make install to build from source earlier. The install is pretty simple by using ./configure;m

Answer 1

There is an option --prefix=path of script configure, where path is a path to directory where you want to install an application. For instance:

./configure --prefix=/opt/erlang-R15B01

Do not forget to add appropriate path to PATH environment variable.

If you didn't use this option during previous installation then the default path was used (/usr or /usr/local) and you can just install new version above old one the same way -

./configure && make && make install.

Answer 2

If you using Erlang for development I would suggest looking into kerl VM manager. It allows you to have multiple VM "installed" with different configuration options and possibility of switching between them.

Answer 3

As another alternative to kerl, we can also use erln8 to have multiple Erlang environment.

https://erln8.github.io/erln8/

Answer 4

How to uninstall Erlang on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get purge erlang*

Uninstall Erlang on Fedora:

sudo yum remove erlang*

If you installed erlang from source using the default home directory, you would need to rm -rf /usr/local/erlang/.

Additional cleanup might me required if you had manually copied libraries or executable to other folders, like */lib or */bin.