Getting Flymake and Rebar to Play Nice

TLDR;
Copy and paste the following into your elisp erlang-mode configuration to get flymake working with Rebar projects.

Intro

Its probably no great surprise to anyone that I dislike Rebar a lot. That said there are times when I have no choice but to use it. This is always either because a company I am contracting for uses it, or an open source project I am contributing to uses it. When I am forced to use it there are a few things I don’t want to give up. Most important among these is Flymake for Erlang. The default setup for Flymake doesn’t work for Rebar projects because Flymake does not know where the code and include paths for dependencies are. Fortunately, we can fix this with a few lines of elisp.

Flymake For Erlang

First make sure you have Flymake for Erlang installed. It is easiest just to follow the directions available on the Erlang Website.

The Elisp Additions for Erlang Flymake

There are two defvars that point to functions that are used to search for the correct code paths and include paths respectively. We are going to replace those functions with our own functions. Both these functions search upwards from the directory that contains the file pointed to by the current buffer, looking for the top most ‘rebar.config’ in the directory path. It then uses that for a base and searches down the directory structure looking for either ‘ebin’ files or ‘include’ files.

There are two things to note here. The first is that you must have already run get-deps for rebar for this to work and the second is that if your project is truly huge or you have way more dependencies then you probably need this search could take a second or two. That is a second or two too long in an interactive compiler like Flymake. That said, the likelihood that you will run into this second problem is quite low.

Getting Started

The very thing you want to do is ensure that you have required the erlang-flymake module. Most of what we do below depends on this.

Finding the Top rebar.config

The second thing we want to do is look for the top rebar.config in the project. If a rebar project contains more then one OTP application its quite likely that it will contain more then one rebar.config. The very topmost rebarconfig` is the right one to serve as root of our search. So we introduce a set of recursive functions to look for that top level dir.

ebm-find-rebar-top-recr will return either the top most directory or nil. Our next function takes that result and does something useful with.

In this function, we get the directory containing the file pointed at by the current buffer. We then call our recr function. If it returns a directory we return that, if it returns nil however, we call the original erlang-flymake-get-app-dir function.

At this point we should have our project root. Now its a simple matter of recursively searching down the directory tree looking for files of a certain name. So we create a function that does just that, given a directory and a name will return a list of absolute paths for each subdirectory that matches the specified name.

Now we write a couple of functions to replace the corresponding functions in erlang-flymake. The first looks for all ebin directories while the second looks for all include directories.

Finally we replace the erlang-flymake versions of those functions with our implementations.

Conclusion

This approach is a bit of a hack, we basically use some heuristics to find a root and then just grab everything under that that looks remotely like a code or include directory. While its a bit hacky it has the valuable upside that its flexible and robust.