Erlang and Yaws on Windows With Cygwin

Most instructions on the net seem to assume that you are using the Windows binary of Erlang. I didn't go that route, because dealing with the mix of Windows paths and UNIX paths just bums me out. Everything below is done via a Cygwin bash prompt.

• wget the Erlang source and tar -zxvf the tarball
• cd to the source directory
• ./configure --prefix=/usr
• make
• make install
• Smoke test erl (I just did help(). and q().)
• mkdir /var/yaws
• wget the Yaws source and tar -zxvf the tarball
• cd to the source directory
• ./configure --prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var --sysconfdir=/etc
• make
• DESTDIR=/. make install
• "yaws -i" crashes. Oops!
• Edit /etc/yaws.conf. Comment out localhost and SSL entries; set the remaining http server to use port 8000 instead of80
• Still crashes. Bummer!

Rollback -- try again after deleting all YAWS and Erlang from Cygwin

• Download WINDOWS Erlang (R11B), and install to K:\erlang
• Add K:\erlang\bin to PATH
• Open a cygwin bash prompt, and
  • smoke test erl (I just issued "q().")
  • tar -zxvf yaws-1.71.tar.gz
  • cd yaw*
  • ./configure --prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var --sysconfdir=/etc
  • make
  • DESTDIR=/. make install
  • edit /etc/yaws.conf and
    • comment out the SSL server and the localhost server;
    • change the port on the remaining server to 8000;
    • prepend "L:/cygwin" to all paths
    • Remove "/usr" from the first ebin_dir and include_dir
• "yaws -i" still crashes.
• Try "make local_install"
• Edit~/yaws.conf and replace all "/cygdrive/k" with "k:"
• "bin/yaws -i" still crashes. I give up. I'll install it all under Ubuntu in a VMware virtual machine.
• Wait! I found a pointer. Trying the following command line from a Windows command prompt appears to start YAWS successfully!
  • erl -pa L:\cygwin\lib\yaws\ebin -yaws debug -run yaws -conf L:\cygwin\etc\yaws.conf -yaws id default
• Ahhh! Now I see the problem in bin/yaws -- the final line does an eval, and the eval consumes the backslashes. My solution is, near the top, to change the case statement to look like this:

case `uname` in

     CYGWIN*)

         yawsdir="L:\\\\cygwin\\\\lib\\\\yaws\\\\"

         werl="/cygdrive/k/erlang/bin/werl"

         delim=\\;;

     *)

         delim=/

esac   

So my final bash command-line looks like this:

yaws -i --conf L:\\\\cygwin\\\\etc\\\\yaws.conf