Install Elm 0.18.0 in 2021

Romario Fitzgerald
2 min readJul 19, 2021

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Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash

So long story short:

  • I got a new client working on an Elixir Project
  • The previous developers used an old version of Elm 0.18.0 (yes, it was old when they started)
  • That version of elm is no longer support nor are the binaries available where they used to be via NPM
  • The application is basically no longer functional unless you’ve already got the system set up for it when various things, including elm 0.18.0 were still supported (which yeah they do — go figure).
  • I’m not going to get into the mess of a codebase, let’s just dig in!

Installation — you need the old binaries

Step 1: Download Elm Binary from the Github Archives.

curl -L -o elm.tar.gz https://github.com/lydell/elm-old-binaries/releases/download/main/0.18.0-linux-x64.tar.gz

Step 2: Unpack The Elm Binary

  • It will extract to a folder called dist_binaries
tar -xzf elm.tar.gz

Step 3: Make the Binaries Executable

chmod +x dist_binaries/*

Step 4: Move the Elm Binaries into your bin folder

mv dist_binaries/* /usr/local/bin/

Step 5: Check Elm in installed

  • Should provide a list of valid commands
elm --help

Note

Ensure your Webpack.Config is set to the path of the elm binary command

{
test: /\.elm$/,
exclude: [
/elm-stuff/, /node_modules/
],
use: {
loader: "elm-webpack-loader",
options: {
cwd: "elm",
}
}
},

That’s all folks!

Though I do hope no one ends up in a situation like this, if you’re already there I hope this helps!

Thanks for reading :)

Comment if you have any questions

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Romario Fitzgerald

I’m a young software developer and entrepreneur who is always looking for ways to grow.