Installing a Pre-compiled Binary (Linux)

By far the easiest way to install and use Galacticus on Linux is to use a pre-compiled binary. For macOS, see the macOS binary instructions.

To do this:

  • download and unpack the source and datasets that are needed at run-time:

wget https://github.com/galacticusorg/galacticus/archive/master.zip -O galacticus.zip
wget https://github.com/galacticusorg/datasets/archive/master.zip -O datasets.zip
unzip galacticus.zip
unzip datasets.zip
mv galacticus-master galacticus
mv datasets-master datasets

  • download and unpack the tools that are needed at run-time:

cd datasets
wget https://github.com/galacticusorg/galacticus/releases/download/bleeding-edge/tools.tar.bz2
tar xvfj tools.tar.bz2

  • download the pre-compiled binary, put it inside the galacticus directory and give it executable permissions:

cd ../galacticus
wget https://github.com/galacticusorg/galacticus/releases/download/bleeding-edge/Galacticus.exe
chmod u=wrx Galacticus.exe

  • set environment variables to indicate the locations at which you downloaded the source and data:

export GALACTICUS_EXEC_PATH=/path/to/galacticus
export GALACTICUS_DATA_PATH=/path/to/datasets

Note

Galacticus needs to write some data files to disk at run time. Usually these are written to $GALACTICUS_DATA_PATH/dynamic/. If you do not have write permission to that location, you should set the environment variable GALACTICUS_DYNAMIC_DATA_PATH to a path where dynamically-generated files can be written.

You can then run a quick test model using:

./Galacticus.exe parameters/quickTest.xml

Notes for WSL

We have successfully run Galacticus on Windows using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), version 2, but found that version 1 did not allow Galacticus to run successfully. Therefore, to run Galacticus on WSL you should check that you are running version 2 of WSL and, if necessary, upgrade to version 2. Details on how to do this are available here.