Simple HelloWorld with Erlang in IntelliJ

Erlang isn’t the most popular functional language out there, but sometimes there’s a need to touch it. I got one project written in it, and therefore I had to setup my IntelliJ to work properly. Here’s a short story how to setup our favourite IDE to run simple HelloWorld in Erlang.

My intent here is to have a simple remind-me post, so don’t expect anything fancy. Here are the steps:

1. 1. Have IntelliJ installed
   2. Install Erlang 
   3. Install Erlang Plugin 
   4. Restart the IDE
   5. You can freely create new Erlang project – simple HelloWorld 
   6. Create a simple file (e.g. hello.erl) and put the following contents there:

      -module(hello).
      -author("michal.piotrowski").
      
      %% API
      -export([hello_world/0]).
      
      
      hello_world() -> io:fwrite("hello, world\n").
      

   7. Create a new runtime config with the Erlang Console as a type. Also you should add build as a before launch step.
   8. Now just run the project – the Erlang console should appear in the IDE. In order to run our simple function just paste there (note the ‘.’ at the end of the line!):

      hello:hello_world().
      

   9. The output should look kind like this:

      hello, world
      ok
      2>
      
      

   10. That means it works 😉