Installation Guide

General

Note: For compilation of GRASS GIS source code, see Compile and Install

This page explains the installation of GRASS binaries.

GRASS GIS requires a workstation running either some flavor of UNIX conforming to POSIX standards like Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, IRIX, or BSD or MS-Windows. It is also possible to run GRASS in MS Windows by using UNIX translation software such as Cygwin or natively with MingGW. Ideally, you should have at least 500 Mb for data and 512 Mb RAM. The source code package needs around 270 MB uncompressed. The resulting binaries may need between 20 MB and 180 MB depending on your platform. During a full compilation you may need temporarily up to 150MB including the source code.

The Software Download Section of the main GRASS web site contains the latest binaries and source code for all supported platforms. That site also has general directions for installing GRASS manually. However, installation is slightly different on each operating system. Here you can find user-contributed pointers for installing GRASS on specific platforms. In particular, many operating systems have package management utilities that can greatly simplify GRASS installation.

MS Windows

The official download page GRASS GIS for MS-Windows

There are two main flavours:

• OSGeo4W installer, for a broad set of open source geospatial software packages including GRASS GIS as well as many other packages (QGIS, GDAL/OGR, and more). Advantage: whenever you run again the OSGeo4W installer, it updates the existing installation.
• Standalone winGRASS installer: install GRASS GIS with the required support packages.

OSGeo4W installer

OSGeo4W is an installer for a broad set of open source geospatial software packages including GRASS GIS as well as many other packages (QGIS, GDAL/OGR, and more). Advantage: whenever you run again the OSGeo4W installer, it updates the existing installation.

• Install using OSGeo4W installer which installs all dependencies as well (PROJ, GDAL, GEOS, Python, etc.)

Launch the OSGeo4W installer

Save the downloaded installer (consider to keep it for future updates) and run it as an administrator. You can select either the grass (stable) or grass-daily (development) packages to install.,

Install with "Administrator" rights

Variant A) Express installation

Use "Express Desktop Install" mode to select stable version.

Use "Express installation" to select stable version

Common installed Python packages:

• python3-gdal
• python3-matplotlib
• python3-wx
• python3-numpy
• python3-pillow
• python3-pip
• python3-ply
• python3-pyopengl
• python3-psycopg2
• python3-six
• python3-pywin32

Additional useful packages (e.g. python3-pandas, msys) can be installed in "Advanced Install" mode.

Variant B) Advanced installation

Use "Advanced Install Mode" to select development version.

Use "Advanced installation" to select development version

winGRASS standalone installer

• Native winGRASS package installer is available here.

QGIS with winGRASS installer

• QGIS including native winGRASS packages are provided here.

GNU/Linux

The official page GRASS GIS Download for GNU/Linux

Debian

A binary version of GRASS is available from the apt repository. As root type:

 apt-get install grass grass-doc

This is the easiest way to install GRASS on Debian. If you choose to install a binary version manually from the main web site, be sure to follow the instructions for making symlinks found as a note to the [GRASS GIS stable weekly snapshot] release.

DebianGIS

There is also the wonderful DebianGIS project which has a more recent GRASS version with its related packages. Read here for more details

Compiling GRASS from source

• See Compile and Install of Source Code

Installation on Fedora

The Fedora project provides RPM-packages for stable releases prepared to install on Fedora systems:

 sudo dnf install grass grass-gui

Mageia

• Mageia provides PROJ/GDAL/GRASS RPMs:

 urpmi grass

openSUSE

• openSUSE provides GRASS and related RPM-packages:

sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper install grass

Alternatively, one can use the One-Click installer: https://software.opensuse.org/package/grass

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS and EPEL)

• Fedora offers GRASS and related binaries for CentOS and EPEL

 dnf install grass

Ubuntu

GRASS Binaries are available from apt/synaptic. From a terminal type:

 sudo apt-get install grass grass-doc

or alternatively, search for and install these packages from Synaptic. This is the easy way to get GRASS on your system. Even if you choose to install binaries from another source, you may want to install this version just so that all (most) dependencies are installed as painlessly as possible.

To get the latest version of GRASS on Ubuntu, compile the code from source. See the Compile and Install section for a shell script that makes this easy.

MacOS

Precompiled GRASS GIS packages for macOS can be found here. These are distributed as zipped *.dmg packages. Opening the dmg prompts the user to simply drag and drop the app into the Applications folder. In fact, they must be installed into the Applications folder and may not run properly in other locations.

A brief introduction to how to install via MacPorts: Compiling on macOS using MacPorts.

Raspberry Pi

See the main page Raspberry Pi.