CEAN Documentation

What is CEAN ?

an Erlang distribution system for both applications and Erlang/OTP framework.
multi-platform: supports many operating systems and architectures
lightweight Erlang: ~4Mb installed size for the minimal system
easy to install: self extractable archive, automatic install/uninstall/upgrade using Erlang shell
easy to use: don't care about modules dependencies, CEAN handles that for you
usefull to create custom Erlang/OTP installation or for installing a minimal Erlang framework

Here is the description of CEAN presented at the 12th Erlang User Conference EUC06-CEAN.pdf.

Installation

You can install the CEAN base system (that includes a minimal Erlang system) using two methods:

download the self extractable installer (Windows not supported yet), and launch it. Then cean is installed into the current directory, and Erlang/OTP is started.
```
sh ./cean_installer.bin
```

download the base archive (available on all platforms), and extract it.

unzip cean_base.zip (on Windows)
tar zxf cean_base.tar.gz (on unix compatible systems)
gunzip cean_base.tar.gz | tar -xf - (if your tar version does not support -z flag)

Using a proxy

If you need to run CEAN behind a firewall, you can edit the start.sh script and define the HTTP_PROXY value to your.proxy.server:port.

Usage

To start CEAN Erlang/OTP, click on the cean icon (under Windows and MacOS only), or go to the cean directory and launch the start script:

$ cd cean
$ ./start.sh

It is possible to install/upgrade/uninstall your Erlang installation using the Erlang shell. No version control is done, only the lattest version of each package is provided. No need to care about downloading and installing into your OTP library directory, CEAN takes care of everything and installs all dependencies.

Available commands:

give some help
```
> cean:help().
```
list available packages
```
> cean:available().
```
list installed packages
```
> cean:installed().
```
check for an installed package (returns true/false)
```
> cean:installed(mnesia).
```
search for packages using keywords
```
> cean:search("web server").
```
install a package (mnesia as example)
```
> cean:install(mnesia).
```
uninstall a package (mnesia as example)
```
> cean:uninstall(mnesia).
```
check new versions of installed packages
```
> cean:new().
```
upgrade a package (ejabberd as example)
```
> cean:upgrade(ejabberd).
```
upgrade the whole distribution
```
> cean:upgrade().
```
check installed CEAN version
```
> cean:version().
```