In this paper, a neuro–adaptive controller with weight norm constraints is proposed for uncertain Euler‒Lagrange systems. The boundedness of the weights in the neuro–adaptive controller design is important to prevent excessively large control inputs and system instability. To ensure the boundedness of the weights, the weight norm constraints are imposed as inequality constraints in the weight adaptation. The adaptation law is derived based on the constrained optimization method. The stability of the proposed controller is analyzed in the sense of Lyapunov, ensuring the boundedness of the tracking error and weight estimation. For the comparative study, two benchmark controllers and the proposed controller were evaluated through a numerical simulation of a two-link manipulator system and compared in terms of tracking performance and parameter dependency. The comparative study verified that the proposed controller has better tracking performance and lower parameter dependency.