I could not find suitable rpms, and since building was sort of a pain, I thought I would put this together. This is not an altogether foreign installation, but there are some tricky dependencies, and a few random devel packages that you need. Start by figuring out the path to the latest source file download, and use wget:
cd ~ wget http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R14B03.tar.gz
Install the build tools and required libraries.
In case anyone gets to this page while chasing errors (these are particular to amzn-main/amzn-updates repositories, but may be of use for RHEL-based distributions):
Note that the wxWidgets Warning will display, since the primary usage for my Amazon Linux Erlang installation is web services (ejabberd, Zotonic CMS, etc.), I am comfortable ignoring this. If you are installing for local application development, you will likely want to build wxWidgets from source (requires GTK libs), or install the erlang-wx from an rpm or alternative repository (a RHEL6 rpm will likely install without issue).
sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++ make libxslt fop ncurses-devel openssl-devel *openjdk-devel unixODBC unixODBC-devel
The latest Erlang/OTP source available is R14B03 - update the directory appropriately as this changes. On a micro instance, configure requires around a minute or two and make took almost 50 minutes.
cd ~/otp_src_R14B03 ./configure make sudo make install
Just to be safe give ‘erl’ a spin:
$ erl Erlang R14B03 (erts-5.8.4) [source] [64-bit] [rq:1] [async-threads:0] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false] Eshell V5.8.4 (abort with ^G) 1>
You can use Ctrl+G, then ‘q’ or Ctrl+C then ‘a’ to quit the shell.
Now you can get started with Erlang or even “learn you some Erlang (for great good!)”. I plan to try my hand at both.