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3 Installation ¶

The latest released version of Gnuastro source code is always available at the following URL:

http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnuastro/gnuastro-latest.tar.gz

Quick start describes the commands necessary to configure, build, and install Gnuastro on your system. This chapter will be useful in cases where the simple procedure above is not sufficient, for example, your system lacks a mandatory/optional dependency (in other words, you cannot pass the $ ./configure step), or you want greater customization, or you want to build and install Gnuastro from other random points in its history, or you want a higher level of control on the installation. Thus if you were happy with downloading the tarball and following Quick start, then you can safely ignore this chapter and come back to it in the future if you need more customization.

Dependencies describes the mandatory, optional and bootstrapping dependencies of Gnuastro. Only the first group are required/mandatory when you are building Gnuastro using a tarball (see Release tarball), they are very basic and low-level tools used in most astronomical software, so you might already have them installed, if not they are very easy to install as described for each. Downloading the source discusses the two methods you can obtain the source code: as a tarball (a significant snapshot in Gnuastro’s history), or the full history⁷⁹. The latter allows you to build Gnuastro at any random point in its history (for example, to get bug fixes or new features that are not released as a tarball yet).

The building and installation of Gnuastro is heavily customizable, to learn more about them, see Build and install. This section is essentially a thorough explanation of the steps in Quick start. It discusses ways you can influence the building and installation. If you encounter any problems in the installation process, it is probably already explained in Known issues. In Other useful software the installation and usage of some other free software that are not directly required by Gnuastro but might be useful in conjunction with it is discussed.

• Dependencies
• Downloading the source
• Build and install