Install elixir with Homebrew, apk, chocolatey, apt, dnf, MacPorts, pacman, scoop, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• elixir
• elixirc
• iex
• mix

Project history

Jose Valim created Elixir as a Plataformatec research-and-development project with the goal of making a productive and extensible language for maintainable, reliable software. The official development page emphasizes that Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, using its scalable and fault-tolerant foundation while staying interoperable with the wider Erlang ecosystem.

The pre-1.0 years were strongly shaped by tooling. Elixir v0.6 introduced Mix as a build tool, while v0.13 announced both hex.pm and ElixirConf and framed those as milestones on the road to v1.0. When v1.0 shipped on September 18, 2014, the project reported 8005 commits by 189 contributors and described the release as a stable platform for community growth.

Elixir's later history is a steady expansion of its standard tooling and production story: releases support in v1.9, runtime configuration via config/runtime.exs in v1.11, formatter and developer-experience work, improved compiler diagnostics, language-server work, and, by v1.20 in June 2026, the project described Elixir as a gradually typed language after several years of type-system research and implementation.

Adoption history

Elixir adoption is tied to developers wanting Erlang VM concurrency and fault tolerance with a more approachable, extensible language and modern tooling. The official blog's production case studies document use across real-time communication, platform-as-a-service, embedded systems, streaming, collaboration, and business applications, with examples including Discord, Heroku, FarmBot, Mozilla, PepsiCo, Remote, Veeps, and Cyanview.

The ecosystem also grew through package and community infrastructure. The v0.13 announcement introduced hex.pm as the package manager and announced ElixirConf, while the v1.0 release explicitly pointed to Hex as the expected home for community projects and reminded users that the Erlang ecosystem was available to Elixir developers.

How it is used

The core command-line workflow is to create and manage projects with Mix, compile and run code with elixir/elixirc, and use IEx for interactive development. A typical project is described by mix.exs, while application configuration commonly lives in config/config.exs for build-time configuration and config/runtime.exs for runtime configuration.

For package-manager users, Elixir is usually installed as a language runtime plus tools, then paired with Erlang/OTP from the same system package set. Developers use Mix to fetch Hex dependencies, run tests, format code, build releases, and launch project-aware shells with iex -S mix.

Why package nerds care

Elixir is package-nerd-interesting because it packages a high-level language on top of another runtime, so version compatibility among Elixir, Erlang/OTP, Hex packages, Mix projects, and language-server tools matters. A formula or distro package is not just delivering a compiler; it is delivering the entry point to BEAM-based application builds, dependency resolution, releases, and editor tooling.

It also represents the modern language-runtime packaging pattern where the build tool, test tool, interactive shell, documentation conventions, formatter, dependency manager, and release builder are expected to arrive together. That all-in-one toolchain shape is why small version shifts can matter to CI, developer machines, and release artifacts.

Timeline

• 2011: Initial commit existed by January 9, according to the v1.0 release post.
• 2012: Elixir was created by Jose Valim as a Plataformatec R&D project.
• 2012: Elixir v0.6 introduced Mix as a build tool.
• 2014: Elixir v0.13 announced hex.pm and ElixirConf on the road to v1.0.
• 2014: Elixir v1.0 shipped on September 18 as the stable 1.x platform.
• 2019: Elixir v1.9 added releases support and improved configuration workflows.
• 2020: Elixir v1.11 introduced config/runtime.exs for unified runtime configuration.
• 2024: Elixir v1.18 added language-server listeners, built-in JSON, and type-checking work.
• 2026: Elixir v1.20 was released and described by the project as making Elixir a gradually typed language.

Related projects

• Erlang/OTP and the BEAM virtual machine are Elixir's runtime foundation.
• Mix is Elixir's project, build, dependency, test, and release tool.
• Hex is the package manager and package registry used by the Elixir ecosystem.
• IEx, ExUnit, Logger, and EEx are core applications shipped with the language toolchain.
• ElixirLS, Expert, Lexical, and Next LS are related editor-code-intelligence projects in the Elixir tooling ecosystem.

Sources

• https://elixir-lang.org/development.html
• https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2014/09/18/elixir-v1-0-0-released/
• https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2014/04/21/elixir-v0-13-0-released/
• https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2013/08/08/elixir-design-goals/
• https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2026/06/03/elixir-v1-20-0-released/
• https://elixir-lang.org/blog/
• https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/main/config-and-releases.html