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SWI-Prolog -- Installation on Linux, *BSD (Unix) |
The official packages are often out of date. PPAs and snaps are created automatically for every release.
Installing from source is often the best option for installing on Linux and *BSD based systems. Building is not complex.
Download the SWI-Prolog source
We recommend using GIT as it makes updates much faster and you can upgrade as well as downgrade easily at any time to any version.
The tar ball is self contained. The GIT repository contains sub modules. The git repository is downloaded (cloned) using the commands below:
git clone https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/swipl-devel.git cd swipl-devel git submodule update --init
Similarly, the sequence to update the source using git and rebuild is
cd swipl-devel git pull git submodule update --init
Building SWI-Prolog from source requires tools as well as libraries. We maintain pages that describes the required dependencies by platform. The last entry of the list below describes the dependencies in platform independent way.
Using cmake the system is typically build in a subdirectory of the downloaded sources. The build system does not add or modify any file in the source tree and (thus) multiple subdirectories can be created holding different configurations. A built system can be removed by removing the build directory. The example below installs the system in your home directory and used ninja to build the system. We recommend building using GCC for best performance.
cd swipl-devel mkdir build cd build cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=PGO -G Ninja .. ninja ctest -j $(nproc) --output-on-failure ninja install
SWI-Prolog can be used without installing by running src/swipl
from below the build
directory. You may create a symbolic link from
your personal bin directory to src/swipl
in the build directory.
A full description for installing a particular configuration in a particular location, dealing with development workflows, etc. can be found in the file CMAKE.md
If you want to call Java from Prolog using JPL, you need to add the
directory holding the JVM shared objects to the dynamic linker search
path. Using default installation on Ubuntu, this is achieved by adding
the following to your ~/.profile
. Check your Java configuration to
find the exact path.
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/amd64/server