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Grammatical Framework Download and Installation

3 August 2025

GF 3.12 was released on 3 August 2025.

What's new? See the release notes.

Note: GF core and the RGL

The following instructions explain how to install GF core, i.e. the compiler, shell and run-time systems. Obtaining the Resource Grammar Library (RGL) is done separately; see the section at the bottom of this page.

Installing from a binary package

Binary packages are available for Debian/Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows and include:

Unlike in previous versions, the binaries do not include the RGL.

Binary packages on GitHub

Debian/Ubuntu

There are two versions: gf-3.12-ubuntu-18.04.deb for Ubuntu 18.04 (Cosmic), and gf-3.12-ubuntu-20.04.deb for Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal).

To install the package use:

sudo apt-get install ./gf-3.12-ubuntu-*.deb

macOS

To install the package, just double-click it and follow the installer instructions.

The packages should work on at least Catalina and Big Sur.

Windows

To install the package, unpack it anywhere.

You will probably need to update the PATH environment variable to include your chosen install location.

For more information, see Using GF on Windows (latest updated for Windows 10).

Installing from Hackage

Instructions applicable for macOS, Linux, and WSL2 on Windows.

GF is on Hackage, so under normal circumstances the procedure is fairly simple:

cabal update
cabal install gf-3.12

Notes

GHC version

The GF source code is known to be compilable with GHC versions 7.10 through to 8.10.

Obtaining Haskell

There are various ways of obtaining Haskell, including:

Installation location

The above steps install GF for a single user. The executables are put in $HOME/.cabal/bin (or on macOS in $HOME/Library/Haskell/bin), so you might want to add this directory to your path (in .bash_profile or similar):

PATH=$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH

Haskeline

GF uses haskeline, which on Linux depends on some non-Haskell libraries that won't be installed automatically by Cabal, and therefore need to be installed manually. Here is one way to do this:

Installing from source code

Obtaining

To obtain the source code for the release, download it from GitHub.

Alternatively, to obtain the latest version of the source code:

  1. If you haven't already, clone the repository with:

    git clone https://github.com/GrammaticalFramework/gf-core.git

  2. If you've already cloned the repository previously, update with:

    git pull

Installing

You can then install with:

cabal install

or, if you're a Stack user:

stack install

For more info on working with the GF source code, see the GF Developers Guide.

For macOS Sequoia, you need to downgrade the LLVM package, see instructions here.

Installing the Python bindings from PyPI

The Python library is available on PyPI as pgf, so it can be installed using:

pip install pgf

We provide binary wheels for Linux and macOS, which include the C runtime and are ready-to-go. If there is no binary distribution for your platform, this will install the source tarball, which will attempt to build the binding during installation, and requires the GF C runtime to be installed on your system.

Installing the RGL from a binary release

Binary releases of the RGL are made available on GitHub. In general the steps to follow are:

  1. Download a binary release and extract it somewhere on your system.
  2. Set the environment variable GF_LIB_PATH to point to wherever you extracted the RGL.

Installing the RGL from source

To compile the RGL, you will need to have GF already installed and in your path.

  1. Obtain the RGL source code, either by:
  1. Run make in the source code folder.

For more options, see the RGL README.

Older releases