Error compiling Ejabberd dependency of a Phoenix application with Mix: could not compile dependency :ejabberd, "mix compile" failed

Question

I have been trying to embed Ejabberd into a Phoenix web application. To do this, I tried to follow this tutorial. The steps were the following:

Installed a ubuntu/xenial64 Vagrant box.
Installed Elixir according to the official guide.
Installed Phoenix according to the official guide.
Installed some packages to successfully compile the Phoenix' seed app dependencies: sudo apt install build-essential libssl-dev libyaml-cpp-dev libyaml-dev libpython2.7-dev

I've added the ejabberd dependency to the mix.exs file:

defmodule PhoenixEjabberd.Mixfile do
  use Mix.Project

  def project do
    [app: :phoenix_ejabberd,
     version: "0.0.1",
     elixir: "~> 1.2",
     elixirc_paths: elixirc_paths(Mix.env),
     compilers: [:phoenix, :gettext] ++ Mix.compilers,
     build_embedded: Mix.env == :prod,
     start_permanent: Mix.env == :prod,
     aliases: aliases(),
     deps: deps()]
  end

  # Configuration for the OTP application.
  #
  # Type `mix help compile.app` for more information.
  def application do
    [mod: {PhoenixEjabberd, []},
     applications: [:phoenix, :phoenix_pubsub, :phoenix_html, :cowboy, 
                    :logger, :ejabberd, :gettext,
                    :phoenix_ecto, :postgrex]]
  end

  # Specifies which paths to compile per environment.
  defp elixirc_paths(:test), do: ["lib", "web", "test/support"]
  defp elixirc_paths(_),     do: ["lib", "web"]

  # Specifies your project dependencies.
  #
  # Type `mix help deps` for examples and options.
  defp deps do
    [{:phoenix, "~> 1.2.1"},
     {:phoenix_pubsub, "~> 1.0"},
     {:phoenix_ecto, "~> 3.0"},
     {:postgrex, ">= 0.0.0"},
     {:phoenix_html, "~> 2.6"},
     {:phoenix_live_reload, "~> 1.0", only: :dev},
     {:gettext, "~> 0.11"},
     {:cowboy, "~> 1.0"},
     {:ejabberd, "~> 16.12", github: "processone/ejabberd"}
   ]
  end

  # Aliases are shortcuts or tasks specific to the current project.
  # For example, to create, migrate and run the seeds file at once:
  #
  #     $ mix ecto.setup
  #
  # See the documentation for `Mix` for more info on aliases.
  defp aliases do
    ["ecto.setup": ["ecto.create", "ecto.migrate", "run priv/repo/seeds.exs"],
     "ecto.reset": ["ecto.drop", "ecto.setup"],
     "test": ["ecto.create --quiet", "ecto.migrate", "test"]]
  end
end

Executed mix do deps.get, compile
Got a very large amount of errors, mostly of undefined functions and variables. I put the full log on this Gist.

Why are those errors occurring? Did anyone succeed in compiling the ejabberd dependency? How? Thank you for your time :).

Aleksei Matiushkin Aleksei Matiushkin · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-28T22:28:35

For unknown reason ejabberd fails to compile from the root project folder. To compile it, I did the following:

mix deps.get # to retrieve ejabberd 
cd deps/ejabberd
mix do deps.get, compile
cd - # to the project root
mix compile # now the project would compile

Error compiling Ejabberd dependency of a Phoenix application with Mix: could not compile dependency :ejabberd, "mix compile" failed

1 Answers