Starting LFE

The lfe executable

While this book focuses upon the use of rebar3 and its LFE plugin -- due entirely to the amount of time it saves through various features it supports -- LFE may be used quite easily without it.

To use LFE and its REPL without rebar3, you'll need to clone the repo, e.g.:

$ cd ~/lab
$ git clone https://github.com/rvirding/lfe.git
$ cd lfe

Since you have read the earlier section on dependencies, you already have Erlang, make, and your system build tools installed. As such, all you have to do is run the following to build LFE:

$ make

This will generate an executable in ./bin and you can start the LFE REPL by calling it:

$ ./bin/lfe

Erlang/OTP 23 [erts-11.0.2] [source] [64-bit] [smp:12:12] [ds:12:12:10] [async-threads:1] [hipe] [dtrace]

   ..-~.~_~---..
  (      \\     )    |   A Lisp-2+ on the Erlang VM
  |`-.._/_\\_.-':    |   Type (help) for usage info.
  |         g |_ \   |
  |        n    | |  |   Docs: http://docs.lfe.io/
  |       a    / /   |   Source: http://github.com/rvirding/lfe
   \     l    |_/    |
    \   r     /      |   LFE v1.3-dev (abort with ^G)
     `-E___.-'

lfe>

If you opt to install LFE system-wide with make install, then you can start the REPL from anywhere by simply executing lfe.

Via rebar3 lfe repl

As demonstrated earlier on several occasions, you can start the LFE REPL with the rebar3 LFE plugin (and this is what we'll do in the rest of this manual):

$ rebar3 lfe repl

Since you have updated your global rebar3 settings (in the "Prerequisites" section, after following the instructions on the rebar3 site), you may also start the LFE REPL from anywhere on your machine using the rebar3 command.