This page describes how to install polymake from the source code. See the downloads page for other ways of installing polymake. In particular, if you are using Ubuntu or Debian, you might want to consider installing our debian packages.

Warning: Unfortunately polymake is not compatible with perl 5.38.0 or newer. Since several Linux distributions have switched to the new perl version the polymake package had to be removed from their repositories. If you want to continue using polymake you can try our new jll-based binaries or see below to build polymake from source with a custom perl.

Usually, following the description in the quick summary should do the job. Please be aware that the installation procedure described on this page works on UNIX systems with the newest version of polymake. If you have special needs, you might find help in other places:

We support some versions of MacOS. Please visit the Mac installation page for detailed instructions.

polymake is not supported on any native Windows platform. You might try to get it running in a UNIX emulation like Cygwin, but you will be left to your own devices since we are not used to this setup.

If you for some reason are trying to build an old version of polymake, please consult the legacy installation page additionally, as it may have details that are not necessary for the most recent polymake anymore.

Installing polymake from sources can usually be accomplished using the following six steps:

• Make sure to have a supported perl version older than 5.38. Otherwise check the section on perl-brew.

• Download a source tarball from the download page.

• Unpack the tarball and change into the source directory with

  tar xjf polymake-VERSION.tar.bz2
  cd polymake-VERSION

• Install all needed dependencies according to your distribution. In the distributions section there are lists of packages for a variety of linux distributions.

• Configure polymake with

  ./configure

  There are many options that you can (de-)activate, see the configuration section and the further options subsection for details.

• Make and install polymake with

  make
  sudo make install

  If your system has multiple cores you can speed of the build process, see the build section for further details.

Before you start you should check whether you have got all the building tools and prerequisite packages. See the distributions section for package lists for some common linux distros. Here's what you'll need:

• C and C++ compilers with full C++14 support, one of the following is recommended:
  • gcc and g++, version at least 5 (Note that these might come in separate packages)
  • clang, version at least 3.4
• C++ Library (one of the following):
  • GNU C++ Library. (On Linux this is usually already in the base system, or comes with gcc)
  • libc++, might come with LLVM/clang

• Ninja build system since polymake version 3.2, depending on the distribution the package might be called ninja-build.

• XML processing tools: libxml2, libxslt (both being standard components of Gnome environment)

• GNU Readline & History library v5.0+

• Perl 5.16.0-5.36.x, with all of the following modules:
  • ExtUtils::Embed, which some distributions ship separately as perl-ExtUtils-Embed
  • XML::SAX
  • XML::Writer
  • Term::ReadLine::Gnu
  • Term::ReadKey
  • JSON

• GMP library 5.1.0+ . Some Linux vendors split the GMP in two packages, shared libraries and development stuff. Please install both. You also need to enable/install the C++ bindings for polymake version 2.11+.
• MPFR library 3.0.0+ . Again both shared libraries and development stuff are required.
• boost headers. The basic libboost-dev should suffice, no shared libraries are required for boost.
• FLINT 2.5.2+. (This dependency is strongly recommended but can be disabled if it cannot be fulfilled)

If your perl version is 5.38 or newer you need to build a custom perl to use with polymake. The easiest way to do this is to install perlbrew with your package manager (or from https://perlbrew.pl/).

Once you have perlbrew installed you need to initialize it with perlbrew init and add source ~/perl5/perlbrew/etc/bashrc to your shell rc file as shown in the output. To build a compatible perl use:

perlbrew install perl-5.36.1 --as pmperl -Duseshrplib

The above command will take a few minutes, once that is done you can (temporarily) switch the perl version for the current shell with perlbrew use pmperl. This change is active until you close that terminal again.

To install the required perl modules for this perl installation run:

perlbrew use pmperl
perlbrew install-cpanm
cpanm Term::ReadLine::Gnu Term::ReadKey XML::SAX XML::Writer JSON SVG

In this shell you can now run the configure script for polymake and continue with the installation instructions. Make sure to always switch the perl to pmperl before running polymake.

If you want pretty things and use bundled extensions, you might want to consider installing further packages.

• bliss for computing automorphism groups of graphs and checking combinatorial equivalence of polytopes. Strongly recommended for the -minimal package, see also below.
• PPL for convex hull computations, in many cases faster than the bundled cdd or lrs code.
  polymake 3.2 requires ppl version at least 1.2.
• Singular for Groebner basis computations. Check the installation instructions for Singular.

• SVG producing SVG pictures
• MongoDB perl interface for the polydb interface

• A webbrowser with WebGL support for the three.js visualization (e.g. chrome, firefox or safari).
• Java Development Kit 1.5+ if you are going to use the visualization tools JavaView or jReality via polymake.
• ant 1.7.1+ with ant-antlr task is needed if you want to recompile the interface to the Java visualization tools, but normally you won't do it.

Since the minimal tarball version does not contain several of the bundled libraries, the packaging system should make sure the following additional dependencies are met. Check ./configure --help for the corresponding command line arguments.

• convex hull computation, at least cdd is required:
  • cddlib shared library, i.e. libcdd-dev or cddlib-devel
  • lrslib shared library, i.e. liblrs-dev or lrslib-devel
  • PPL shared library, i.e. libppl-dev or ppl-devel
• graph isomorphism computation, exactly one of the following:
  • bliss shared library, i.e. libbliss-dev
    debian-like with headers in <prefix>/include/bliss/
  • nauty source directory (supported since polymake 3.0r2)

As the PermLib and SymPol librarys polymake uses are not available in most distributions, they are included even in the minimal tarball.

The next step after unpacking the tar ball is

./configure

polymake's configuration is not based on autoconf, but it looks similar. If you are working in a standard environment then your configuration probably does not require any further options. For more elaborate ways to configure your setup see below.

After the configuration, you get a new subtree build.ARCH, where ARCH is usually an abbreviation of your hardware platform as reported by uname -m . Inside this directory there is a file conf.make which can be manually edited, if necessary.

To get the complete picture of the configuration options:

./configure --help

It is common for GNU/Linux programs to be installed into /usr/local. Obviously, the installation requires write privileges set accordingly. If you want to install to somewhere else use --prefix=/my/installation/directory. Notice that the installation directory must be distinct from the directory where you compile.

• Enforcing a different directory layout.
  Using the following options you can place the parts of the polymake installation according to any possible layout convention:
  • --prefix=DIR put everything beneath this directory.
  • --exec-prefix=DIR put the architecture-dependent parts beneath this directory, namely the main script polymake and the compiled modules.
  • --bindir=DIR put the main script polymake in this directory
  • --includedir=DIR put the header files in this directory (actually, creates a subdirectory polymake there)
  • --libdir=DIR put the callable library libpolymake in this directory
  • --libexecdir=DIR put the dynamic modules (loadable at runtime) and Java native interface libraries in this directory (actually, creates a subdirectory polymake there)
  • --datadir=DIR put the architecture-independent parts in this directory, namely the perl modules, rule files, scripts, and java archives.
  • --docdir=DIR put the automatically generated documentation in HTML format in this directory
  • --build=ARCH assign this architecture name to the current build configuration; per default, some excerpt from uname -a is taken.
• Specifying the compilation options:
  • CC=program the C compiler
  • CFLAGS="options" options for the C compiler, e.g. enabling machine-specific optimization or non-standard include paths
  • CXX=program the C++ compiler
  • CXXFLAGS="options" options for the C++ compiler
  • CXXOPT=-On optimization level of the C++ compiler (some unlucky versions happen to produce broken code when trying hard to optimize)
  • LDFLAGS="options" options for the linker, e.g. non-standard library search paths
  • LIBS="-lLib …" additional non-standard libraries required for C++ programs
  • PERL=program the perl interpreter
  • --with-toolchain=DIR path to a full GCC or LLVM (including clang and libc++) installation, automatically sets the above flags for the compiler and standard C++ library.
  • --with-libcxx build against the libc++ library instead of the GNU libstdc++, useful when building with LLVM/Clang.
  • --without-native don't optimize for the current CPU, i.e. don't set -march=native to allow running on different CPUs (with the same architecture).
• Specifying the build prerequisites:
  • --with-gmp=DIR location of the Gnu MultiPrecision library (GMP). Its public header file is expected at DIR/include/gmp.h and the shared libraries under DIR/lib or DIR/lib64.
  • --with-mpfr=DIR location of the Gnu MultiPrecision Floating-point Reliable library (MPFR). Its public header file is expected at DIR/include/mpfr.h and the shared libraries under DIR/lib or DIR/lib64.
  • --with-boost=DIR location of the boost headers
  • --with-libxml2=DIR location of the XML processing library

• Optional libraries, see also the external software page:
  • --with-ppl=DIR installation directory of the Parma Polyhedra Library (PPL)
  • --with-cdd=DIR installation directory of cddlib
  • --with-lrs=DIR installation directory of lrslib
  • --with-bliss=DIR installation directory of bliss, headers must be in DIR/include/bliss/
  • --with-nauty-src=DIR nauty source directory
  • --with-singular=DIR singular installation directory
  • --with-soplex=DIR soplex directory, built with GMP=true and SHARED=true
  • --with-permlib=DIR permlib header directory
  • --with-sympol=DIR sympol installation directory, headers should be DIR/include/sympol/, yal and matrix must be in subfolders. Note that using a custom sympol installation is incompatible with the bundled versions of cdd, lrs and permlib; i.e. those then have to be installed separately.
  • --with-libnormaliz=DIR libnormaliz installation directory

Remark: Please avoid mixing different C++ libraries when building the dependencies and polymake and make sure they use the same C++ ABI version:
Libraries with C++ interface should be built with -std=c++11 or newer.

• Java interface options:
  • --with-java=DIR the top directory of the Java SDK installation
  • --with-jni-headers=DIR the location of jni.h header file, if it resides outside the SDK tree (mostly needed on Macs)
  • --without-java you don't have any Java SDK installed on your machine.
  • --with-fink=DIR Fink installation top directory (for Mac OS only). Usually it resides at /sw.
• Preparing the Java interface re-build (normally not needed):
  • --with-ant=program the ANT tool
  • --with-javaview=program the JavaView start script
  • --without-javaview JavaView is not installed on your machine; jReality will still be recompiled

If you opt to exclude Java components from the build, you won't be able to use any of Java-based visualization tools with polymake. However, you (or other users of your polymake installation) can revise this decision later: after having installed a Java SDK, you'll have to reconfigure the corresponding rule files.

The results of running the configuration script are stored in the file build.ARCH/conf.make . You might edit it manually if needed. At the very beginning the copy of your last configure command is stored for documentation purposes. You can pick it there and repeat the configuration for a different platform or with different options. As long as you specify different architecture names, several configurations can peacefully co-exist.

Having finished the configuration, run

make

If your machine is equipped with several CPUs (or cores), you should utilize them all: make -jN , where N is the number of cores to be used. Otherwise schedule the compilation step for your extended lunch break. Please be aware that gcc may require up to 1GB RAM (per core used) during the compilation!

If you want, for whatever reason, recompile the Java interface modules, it can be done with

make all-java

Then, run

sudo make install

If you are building polymake for several hardware platforms sharing the architecture-independent parts, the command from the second platform on should be

sudo make install-arch [Arch=NAME]

Note: If you are installing polymake in your home-directory, i.e. you have set --prefix, you should omit sudo in the above commands.

We are proud to announce that polymake is part of the debian package library. So for newer debian based distributions like Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) you can install polymake by using the command:

sudo apt-get install polymake

This will install polymake and all its dependencies.

Please note that jReality is not part of the debian package (which is built from the minimal tarball). You may want to use other visualization methods like threejs, tikz or javaview.

On most recent Ubuntu versions installing the following packages (and their dependencies) should suffice to build polymake 4.1 from source:

sudo apt-get install ant ant-optional default-jdk g++ libboost-dev \
libflint-dev libgmp-dev libgmpxx4ldbl libmpfr-dev libperl-dev libterm-readline-gnu-perl \
libxml-perl libxml-writer-perl libterm-readkey-perl libjson-perl ninja-build

If you are going to use the polymake Database, you'll also need to install

libmongodb-perl

The following packages are recommended but not strictly necessary:

libbliss-dev libsvg-perl

The following should suffice to be able to build polymake from source on Fedora

sudo dnf install ant java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel gcc-c++ boost-devel \
flint-devel gmp-devel mpfr-devel perl-devel perl-XML-Writer \
perl-ExtUtils-Embed perl-TermReadKey perl-Term-ReadLine-Gnu bliss-devel \
ninja-build perl-JSON

You might need to specify the path to your java installation with --with-java=JAVA_HOME.

The following should suffice to be able to build polymake from source on Arch Linux 4.13.12:

sudo pacman -S gcc readline perl libxml-perl perl-xml-writer perl-json \
perl-term-readline-gnu perl-term-readkey mpfr gmp boost ninja flint

You need to install ant and ant-antlr packages to recompile the java sources. PPL is available in ppl-devel. The package for Ninja is called ninja.

The following packages together with their dependencies should suffice to build polymake on a minimal install of SL7:

lbzip2 perl gcc-c++ perl-XML-Writer perl-Term-ReadLine-Gnu \
perl-Term-ReadKey gmp-devel mpfr-devel boost-devel perl-ExtUtils-Embed\
ninja-build

For visualization via jreality java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel and and-antlr are needed, passing --with-java=/usr/lib/jvm/java to configure should help with the java detection.