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Grammatical Framework Download and Installation

GF 3.8 was released on 22 June 2016.

What's new? See the Release notes.

Binary packages

Platform Download Features How to install
Mac OS X gf-3.8.pkg GF+S+C+P Double-click on the package icon (*)
Mac OS X gf-3.8-bin-intel-mac.tar.gz GF+S+C+P sudo tar -C /usr/local -zxf gf-3.8-bin-intel-mac.tar.gz
Ubuntu (32-bit) gf_3.8-1_i386.deb GF+S+C+J+P sudo dpkg -i gf_3.8-1_i386.deb
Ubuntu (64-bit) gf_3.8-1_amd64.deb GF+S+C+J+P sudo dpkg -i gf_3.8-1_amd64.deb
Windows gf-3.8-bin-windows.zip GF+S unzip gf-3.8-bin-windows.zip

Features: GF = GF shell and grammar compiler and the Resource Grammar Library, S = gf -server mode, C = C run-time system, J/P = Java/Python binding to the C run-time system

Notes

The Windows package is installed by just unpacking it anywhere. You will probably need to set the PATH and GF_LIB_PATH environment variables, see Inari's notes on Installing GF on Windows.

The .deb packages should work on Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04 and 16.04 and similar Linux distributions.

The packages for Mac OS X should work on at least 10.9, 10.10 and 10.11 (Mavericks, Yosemite and El Capitan).

(*) Note that for compatibility with OS X 10.11, gf-3.8.pkg will install the gf executable in /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin, so make sure /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH. Also, if you still have an older version of GF installed in /usr/bin, remove it and/or make sure /usr/local/bin comes before /usr/bin in your $PATH so you don't accidentally run the old version.

The Mac OS and Linux .tar.gz packages are designed to be installed in /usr/local. You can install them in other locations, but then you need to set the GF_LIB_PATH environment variable:

    export GF_LIB_PATH=/usr/local/share/gf-3.8/lib

where /usr/local should be replaced with the path to the location where you unpacked the package.

Installing the latest release from source

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

  1. Install a recent version of the Haskell Platform, e.g. version 7.10.3 (see note 2 below)
  2. cabal update
  3. On Linux: install some C libraries from your Linux distribution (see note 1 below)
  4. cabal install gf

You can also download the full source package from here: gf-3.8.tar.gz.

Notes

The above steps installs GF for a single user. The executables are put in $HOME/.cabal/bin (or, with recent versions of the Haskell platform on Mac OS X, in $HOME/Library/Haskell/bin), so it is a good idea to put a line in your .bash_profile or .profile to add that directory to you path:

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

or

    PATH=$HOME/Library/Haskell/bin:$PATH

Note 1. 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:

Note 2. The GF source code has been updated to compile with GHC 8.0.1. Using older versions of GHC (7.10.3, 7.10.2, 7.8, 7.6) should work too.

Known problems

There seems to be a bug in some versions of Cabal that can cause

    Distribution/Simple/PackageIndex.hs:124:8-13: Assertion failed

if the same version of GF is already installed. If you encounter this, you can use ghc-pkg unregister gf to remove the installed version of GF and ghc-pkg list gf to verify that it is gone.

Installing from the latest developer source code

The first time:

    darcs get --lazy http://www.grammaticalframework.org/ GF
    cd GF
    cabal install

Subsequently:

    cd GF
    darcs pull -a
    cabal install

Alternatively, you can get the code from the GF GitHub mirror, which is updated nightly.

The above notes for installing from source apply also in these cases. For more info on working with the GF source code, see the GF Developers Guide.

Older releases