Erlang.mk originates from the Cowboy project. Cowboy started as a Rebar project and I, Loïc Hoguin, was very happy with it for a couple years. Over time however I started getting annoyed and frustrated by a number of things, including bad defaults, changing defaults and overall slowness.

In particular, at the time I gave up on Rebar, the Cowboy test suite was taking about five minutes to run. A quick experiment showed I could get much lower times by simply invoking ct_run directly. On January 4th, 2013, the Cowboy test suite took less than a minute to complete.

Following this success I started removing a little more and, on the fateful day of January 5th, 2013, removed the dependency on Rebar entirely. Rebar, and in particular the concept of dependencies, was, and still is, a pretty strong influence.

Erlang.mk was conceived.

A few months passed and, on May 1st, 2013, the Erlang.mk repository was created. Erlang.mk was born.

Little did I know how much it would grow.

Erlang.mk would eventually become a much larger file able to deal with many more projects than just Cowboy. From the birth of the project, the biggest force for growth was user contributions, because Erlang.mk appealed to a variety of people with different needs, needs that Erlang.mk was not fulfilling yet.

The project was split into smaller files focused on a different feature each, and a build script was written to build the single Erlang.mk file.

A test suite was contributed by a user, and later taken as a basis for the current, much more complete test suite. Turns out testing a Makefile is pretty straightforward.

A package index was added to solve the problem of discovering Erlang projects.

After trying to see if Erlang build tools could cooperate, the decision was made to improve compatibility with existing Rebar projects by patching Rebar out, using Rebar. This feature, called autopatch, proved very successful and made Erlang.mk compatible with more than 90% of all Erlang projects.

Erlang.mk documentation was much improved and the Erlang.mk website was created in the summer of 2015.

Over the year of 2015, Erlang.mk went from curiosity to a serious alternative to other Erlang build tools. The user base increased immensely and large projects started using it, including RabbitMQ from the 3.6.0 release onward.

A bright future lies ahead.