Elm on Arch Linux

I wanted to try out Elm programming language on my Arch Linux laptop and here are the instructions for installing it.

The official Elm docs point to npm based install and that’s how I did it. First I had to install npm with normal pacman -S npm command.

When I had npm installed, Elm was quite easy to install with $ npm install -g elm. This requires root privileges as it installs the binaries to /usr/lib/ system directory.

After npm installs the binaries, close the terminal and open it again to get the elm command working. At this point I ran into error message telling me I didn’t have all the required libraries.

$ elm repl --help
/usr/lib/node_modules/elm/Elm-Platform/0.16.0/.cabal-sandbox/bin/elm-repl:
error while loading shared libraries: libtinfo.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory


I did some googling and found this AUR package for the missing libtinfo . Quick install and then the elm binaries worked!

It is very clear that Elm is very young technology and its installation procedure is not yet matured. But hey, it’s working now! Now head to the Elm docs.