How to install Elixir using Chocolatey on Windows

I got hooked on Elixir after reading Programming Elixir by Dave Thomas so I had to figure out how to install it on Windows. Turns out that installing Elixir on Windows is very easy using Chocolatey. If you haven’t heard of Chocolately before, it is the missing package manager for Windows (similar to apt-get or homebrew). When combined with Boxstarter, it can be used to automatically set up your development environment.

Installing Elixir

To install Elixir using Chocolaty:

1. Make sure you have Chocolaty installed.
2. Open an administrative cmd prompt
3. Type choco install elixir (add -y to skip install prompts)
4. Restart your cmd prompt.

That is it! The last command will not only install the latest version of Elixir but it will install Erlang which is a prerequisite for Elixir. It will also add Elixir to your PATH (if not you can find the commands at C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\Elixir\bin and manually add it) so you can open up a command prompt and type iex to start Elixir’s Interactive Mode.

Have fun getting started with Elixir!