Getting started with Erlang Webmachine on Fedora 20

The problems I am encountering in learning erlang on Fedora 20 is helping me understand erlang better :)

I had to install erlang-ibrowse and erlang-meck even for starting the skeleton application. They should probably be included in the dependencies of erlang-webmachine rpm.

The template for creating the skeleton application is included in
/usr/lib64/erlang/lib/webmachine-1.10.1/priv/templates.

To create a new skeleton app:
$ cd /usr/lib64/erlang/lib/webmachine-1.10.1/priv
$ rebar create template=wmskel prefix= appid=

$ cd
$ rebar compile

The wmskel.template needed to be modified to comment out the following lines related to rebar:
%{file, "{{webmachine}}/rebar", "{{prefix}}/rebar"}.
%{chmod, 8#744, "{{prefix}}/rebar"}.

The version number in rebar.config also needed to be changed from 1.9.* to 1.10.*

However, execution of start.sh fails with the error:
 init terminating in do_boot ()

The issue was that in .erl, the following statement fails:
   ensure_started(mochiweb),

It appears that some of the dependencies of mochiweb are not implicitly started. I am not sure if I am missing something, this is a fedora specific issue or a current mochiweb version issue. A work around was to modify the start function in src/.erl adding the lines in bold:

start() ->
    ensure_started(inets),
    ensure_started(crypto),
    ensure_started(asn1),
    ensure_started(public_key),
    ensure_started(ssl),
    ensure_started(xmerl),
    ensure_started(compiler),
    ensure_started(syntax_tools),
    ensure_started(mochiweb),
    application:set_env(webmachine, webmachine_logger_module,
                        webmachine_logger),
    ensure_started(webmachine),
    application:start(webmachine_demo).

For diagnosing, modifying ensure_started function in the same file helped.

ensure_started(App) ->
    case application:start(App) of
        ok ->
            ok;
        {error, {already_started, App}} ->
            ok;
        X -> io:format("App failed ~w ~w~n",[App, X])
    end.


Now,
$ rebar compile
$ ./start.sh



http://localhost:8000  should show "Hello, new world".

It may be preferable to modify the start function in templates/src/wmskel.erl.