Best Practice: Erlang Application Deploy on windows.

Question

When deploying a ready to use erlang application I don't want the user to

• Find the right erl release on the internet.
• Install the erl vm
• unzip and decide a location for the beam files (with the application)
• read a readme
• modify anything that even looks like a config file

I have a couple of ideas of what could be a way but I would like to get some input.

Answer 1

SAE (stand-alone Erlang) used to be a pretty good solution for situations like you describe, but that no longer seems to be maintained.

Although I've never used it myself, CEAN seems like it might come close to what you want: it offers a self-extracting installer (though not for Windows at present) and the option to deliver a customized minimal Erlang framework.

Answer 2

There is also Erlware.

At our core we host public repositories containing reliable Erlang OTP-compliant applications. Our repositories enable developers to use software written by the Erlang community and to publish and distribute their own software.

It's more backend orient though, so not a complete solution.

Answer 3

The reltool application first released with Erlang R13B02 is aimed at solving this issue. Note that it is currently a beta release (version 0.5).