Installation Guide

General

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 page GRASS GIS Download for MS-Windows

• Native winGRASS packages (including the installer) are provided here. See also WinGRASS Current Status.

• winGRASS/Cygwin packages are provided here (requires Cygwin UNIX emulator, see there).

• QGIS including native winGRASS packages are provided here.

• Install using OSGeo4W installer (GRASS 6 needs to be checked in the "Express" install. GRASS 7 needs to be selected in the "Advanced" installation.)

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 [6.4 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

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

 yum install grass

Mandriva

• Mandriva provides PROJ/GDAL/GRASS RPMs. Newer versions they are in the "backports" section:

 urpmi grass

openSUSE

• openSUSE provides GRASS and related RPM-packages.

GRASS 6: To install GRASS 6 release on openSUSE:

From terminal:

sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Application:/Geo/openSUSE_12.3/ GEO
sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper install grass

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

GRASS 7: To install the latest GRASS 7 SVN snapshot:

sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper install grass7

Alternatively, one can use the One-Click installer: http://software.opensuse.org/package/grass7

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS and Scientific Linux)

• Enterprise Linux offers GRASS and related binaries

 yum 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.

Slackware

Slackware 12 packages for GRASS binary distributions and additional libraries are available from The Italian Slackware Community (release version) and here (SVN version).

Raspberry Pi

See the main page Raspberry Pi.

macOS

Precompiled GRASS 6 and GRASS 7 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.