Install from Pre-built Binaries

Linux and OS X

Installation from a pre-built binary tarball should in the long run be the easiest and fastest way to install Sage. This is not necessarily the case right now. Note that Sage is itself a programming environment, so building it from source guarantees you maximum flexibility in the long run. Nonetheless, we provide pre-built binaries.

Assumptions: You have a computer with at least 2 GB of free disk space and the operating system is Linux (32-bit or 64-bit) or OS X (10.4 or later). An SSL library (OpenSSL recommended) is installed in your operating system.

Highly Recommended: It is highly recommended that you have LaTeX installed. If you want to view animations, you should install either ImageMagick or ffmpeg. ImageMagick or dvipng is also used for displaying some LaTeX output in the Sage notebook.

Download the latest binary tarball from http://www.sagemath.org/download.html. For example, it might be called sage-x.y.z-x86_64-Linux.tgz. Unpack it on your computer in a directory which you have permission to read and write:

tar zxvf sage-x.y.z-x86_64-Linux.tgz

You can move the resulting directory SageMath anywhere and still run ./sage from it, as long as the full path name has no spaces in it. The first time you run Sage, you will see a message like

Rewriting paths for your new installation directory
===================================================

This might take a few minutes but only has to be done once.

patching ...  (long list of files)

At this point, you can no longer move your Sage installation and expect Sage to function.

You can also copy the file sage from the SageMath directory and put it anywhere, e.g., /usr/local/bin/, but then you have to edit the #SAGE_ROOT=/path/to/sage-version line at the top of the copied file /usr/local/bin/sage (you should not edit the original sage executable). The variable SAGE_ROOT should point to the directory SageMath of the extracted Sage tarball. As long as /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH, you can then type sage from the command line to run Sage. Another approach is to create a symbolic link, say /usr/local/bin/sage, pointing to SageMath/sage

ln -s /path/to/SageMath/sage /usr/local/bin/sage

With this approach, there is no need to edit /usr/local/bin/sage, the SAGE_ROOT path will be discovered automatically thanks to the symbolic link. When you want to install a new version of Sage, just delete the old link and create a new one.

We currently distribute .dmg files for recent versions of OS X, but we would like to make Sage more of a native application. Work for that is ongoing, and help is always welcome.

Microsoft Windows

The best way to install Sage on Windows is to install VirtualBox for Windows and then download and install the VirtualBox distribution of Sage. See this URL for further instructions on installing Sage on Windows. For more information on how to set up and run the Sage Virtual Machine, please read these additional instructions.