The Fedora project is tracking the SWI-Prolog stable versions as package pl. This page describes installing the dependencies for SWI-Prolog that are needed for building from source.

As of May 2024, Fedora (currently version 40) is the main development platform for SWI-Prolog. This used to be Ubuntu. Ubuntu is still well maintained as it is used by the CI on Github as well as for running the web services of SWI-Prolog.

Dependencies

Use the following commands to obtain all dependencies for a full build from source.

dnf install \
  gcc gcc-c++ \
  cmake \
  ninja-build \
  gperftools-devel \
  freetype-devel \
  gmp-devel \
  java-17-openjdk-devel \
  jpackage-utils \
  junit \
  libICE-devel \
  libjpeg-turbo-devel \
  libSM-devel \
  libX11-devel \
  libXaw-devel \
  libXext-devel \
  libXft-devel \
  libXinerama-devel \
  libXmu-devel \
  libXpm-devel \
  libXrender-devel \
  libXt-devel \
  ncurses-devel \
  openssl-devel \
  pkgconfig \
  readline-devel \
  libedit-devel \
  libdb-devel \
  unixODBC-devel \
  zlib-devel \
  uuid-devel \
  libarchive-devel \
  libyaml-devel \
  python3-devel

For debugging Janus (the Python interface) using -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug it is advised to install the debug version of the Python embedding library called libpython<version>d.so. On Fedora, the debug library is installed using

sudo dnf install python3-debug

Building the PDF documentation

To build the PDF documentation you need LaTeX and several helpers. The following set of dependencies was established on Fedora 40 for SWI-Prolog 9.3.6

sudo dnf install \
        texlive-latex \
        texlive-a4wide \
        texlive-tabulary \
        texlive-dvips \
        texlive-bibtex \
        texlive-makeindex \
        texlive-metafont \
        texlive-ec

Building the RPM

You can build an RPM package from the sources, for example to deploy locally using the CMake CPack tool. See CMAKE.md in the top directory of the sources.