Try out elixir. It runs on the Erlang VM but is easy to get up and running and has a great community. It's much easier to add external libraries and uses its own package manager.
Thanks for the suggestions (you, and the other two people mentioning the same thing). I have just started looking at Elixir, and I'm hoping that will work better.
Am I just to assume that Erlang deployment really is as complicated and poorly documented as I thought, since no one suggested any documentation, but three people suggested I switch to Elixir.
In my experience, Erlang doesn't have a standard way of doing a deployment. There are 3rd party apps like Rebar and others, but they are both not available by default (after a fresh install) and seriously underdocumented. The result of this, IMHO, is that everyone builds their own build and deployment system, using shell scripting, Make or Erlang itself.
Elixir includes Mix - a standard task runner - and Hex as part of the distribution. It also provides a central pkg repository (https://hex.pm/packages). It's much, much easier to start a project and pull all your dependencies.
I guess you could use Hex and Mix with pure Erlang projects, but I haven't tried this.
rebar3 will become the standard build tool for erlang, it's already in the erlang organization (https://github.com/erlang/rebar3), most people nowadays use either rebar3 or erlang.mk (https://erlang.mk/), both work really well, at least for me.
