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Installation

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Takahiro Ueda edited this page Oct 20, 2018 · 25 revisions

Using a package manager

The easiest way to install a stable version of FORM would be to use a package manager, although package managers tend to have old versions of FORM in their official repositories or FORM may be not available. (See Repology.) As of July 2017, there are a few user repositories for package managers to install FORM 4.2.0.

  • AUR (Arch Linux)
pacaur -S form

brew install tueda/form/form

Building from the source distribution

You can build your own FORM binaries on Unix-like systems. To compile FORM sources, you need reasonably modern C and C++ compilers and the make utility. We recommend to build FORM with two external libraries, GMP and zlib. All of them can be installed by:

  • Debian or Ubuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential libgmp-dev zlib1g-dev
  • Fedora 26
sudo dnf install gcc-c++ gmp-devel make zlib-devel
  • CentOS 7
sudo yum install gcc-c++ gmp-devel make zlib-devel
  • Cygwin (with apt-cyg)
apt-cyg update
apt-cyg install gcc-g++ libgmp-devel make zlib-devel

Source distributions of stable versions of FORM can be found in the Releases page as files with the name form-<version>.tar.gz. (The page also contains pre-built reference manuals and binaries for some specific systems). As of July 2017, the latest source distribution is form-4.2.0.tar.gz. After downloading the source distribution and unpacking it, you need to type the following commands in the generated directory:

./configure
make
sudo make install

By default, make install installs binaries into /usr/local/bin. This installation path can be changed by passing the --prefix=DIR option to the ./configure script. You can also manually copy the compiled binary sources/form to any directory. In addition to form, tform will be compiled when POSIX Threads are available. More advanced options are found in the help message shown by ./configure --help. The file "INSTALL" also contains description of some options.

Building from the source repository

If you are not satisfied with a release version for some reason, you can build FORM from the development repository. This requires additional software: Git and Autoconf/Automake. Moreover, it is highly recommended to run the test suite, which needs Ruby with the so-called test/unit library. They can be installed by:

  • Debian or Ubuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install automake git ruby
  • Fedora 26
sudo dnf install automake git ruby rubygem-test-unit
  • CentOS 7
sudo yum install automake git ruby rubygem-minitest
  • Cygwin (with apt-cyg)
apt-cyg update
apt-cyg install automake git ruby

Then, you can clone the repository by

git clone https://github.com/vermaseren/form

which generates a form directory. Type the following commands in the generated directory:

autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make check
sudo make install
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