The One with Homebrew, Fish and asdf

Posted on 2 mins read

I have had to set up a version manager for Elixir, so I tried to install asdf which did not really work how I thought it would. According to https://asdf-vm.com/#/, it should be pretty straightforward, but apparently, the combination of Homebrew and Fish shell is tricky, again. So here is how it works for me (tested with 2 Macbooks with the same setup):

brew install asdf works fine, but then I am getting errors. So this is what needed to be added to my fish config:

source (brew --prefix asdf)/asdf.fish

Completions are also not installed where the guide says, so the correct command seems to be:

mkdir -p ~/.config/fish/completions; and cp /usr/local/share/fish/vendor_completions.d/asdf.fish ~/.config/fish/completions

Now asdf version prints out the version and some docs.

When I now try to install the necessary brew plugin dependencies, there are errors during the linking step. Apparently, I am not supposed to install something in /usr/local, but that’s where Homebrew wants to do this. Fixed by running

sudo chown -R (whoami) (brew --prefix)/*

and then

brew install \
  coreutils automake autoconf openssl \
  libyaml readline libxslt libtool unixodbc \
  unzip curl

Next steps:

asdf plugin-add erlang
asdf plugin-add elixir
asdf install erlang 22.0
asdf install elixir 1.8.2
asdf global erlang 22.0
asdf global elixir 1.8.2

There are some popups asking me to install Java in order to use the javac command line tool, but so far everything seems to work without doing that. elixir -v prints out

Erlang/OTP 22 [erts-10.4] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [ds:4:4:10] [async-threads:1] [hipe]

Elixir 1.8.2 (compiled with Erlang/OTP 20)

and I seem to be able to start up our latest application (which needs Elixir 1.8 because of some Ecto issues and that’s why I needed to start this messy journey in the first place), yay!