Is there a way to make :dbg available in exrm releases?

Question

When I run my application in my dev environment with

iex -S mix phoenix.server

I am able to use :dbg.tracer to look into my code. But when I build an exrm release and run it with

bin/myapp console

When I try to use :dbg.tracer it tells me "module :dbg is not available". Is there a way to make :dbg available in an exrm release? That would be really handy.

Answer 1

It looks like your server does not have erlang-runtime-tools installed, but your dev environment does. To address this in Debian, you can run sudo apt-get install erlang-runtime-tools. Once that is done, you should be able to run :dbg.tracer/0 from your console without any extra steps.

In the future, if you want to install Erlang along with all of its applications such as :crypto, :dbg, etc... then I suggest you install esl-erlang. In Ubuntu, for example, sudo apt-get install esl-erlang.