$ ./configure
$ make world
$ make install (you may need superuser rights)
Note these installation instructions are meant for users. For Coq developers, there is an extra set of targets better suited to them: please see the contributing guide.
-
Check that you have the required dependencies as specified in the top-level INSTALL file.
-
Decompress Coq's source code into a build folder; the name doesn't matter. You will need around 300 MiB free disk space to compile Coq, and a similar amount to install it.
-
Then, configure Coq with the command:
./configure <options>
The
configure
script will ask you for directories where to put the Coq binaries, standard library, man pages, etc. It will propose default values.For a list of options accepted by the
configure
script, run./configure -help
. The main options accepted are:-
-prefix <dir>
Binaries, library, and man pages will be respectively installed in<dir>/bin
,<dir>/lib/coq
, and<dir>/man
-
-bindir <dir>
(default:/usr/local/bin
) Directory where the binaries will be installed -
-libdir <dir>
(default:/usr/local/lib/coq
) Directory where the Coq standard library will be installed -
-mandir <dir>
(default:/usr/local/share/man
) Directory where the Coq manual pages will be installed -
-arch <value>
(default is the result of the commandarch
) An arbitrary architecture name for your machine (useful when compiling Coq on two different architectures for which the result of "arch" is the same, e.g. Sun OS and Solaris) -
-local
Compile Coq to run in its source directory. The installation (step 6) is not necessary in that case. -
-browser <command>
Use to open an URL in a browser. %s must appear in , and will be replaced by the URL. -
-flambda-opts <flags>
This experimental option will pass specific user flags to the OCaml optimizing compiler. In most cases, this option is used to tweak the flambda backend; for maximum performance we recommend using:-flambda-opts `-O3 -unbox-closures`
but of course you are free to try with a different combination of flags. You can read more at https://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/flambda.html
There is a known problem with certain OCaml versions and
native_compute
, that will make compilation to require a large amount of RAM (>= 10GiB) in some particular files.We recommend disabling native compilation (
-native-compiler no
) with flambda unless you use OCaml >= 4.07.0.
If you want your build to be reproducible, ensure that the
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
environment variable is set as documented in https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/ -
-
Still in the Coq sources directory, do:
make world
to compile Coq (this builds both native and bytecode version by default, or only the bytecode version if a native OCaml port is not available).
This will compile the entire system. This phase can take more or less time, depending on your architecture and is fairly verbose. On a multi-core machine, it is recommended to compile in parallel, via make -jN where N is your number of cores.
If you wish to create timing logs for the standard library, you can pass
TIMING=1
(for per-line timing files) orTIMED=1
(for per-file timing on stdout). Further variables and targets are available for more detailed timing analysis; see the section of the reference manual oncoq_makefile
. If there is any timing target or variable supported bycoq_makefile
-made Makefiles which is not supported by Coq's own Makefile, please report that as a bug. -
You can now install the Coq system. Executables, libraries, and manual pages are copied in some standard places of your system, defined at configuration time (step 3). Just do:
umask 022 make install
Of course, you may need superuser rights to do that.
-
Note that the
install
target does support theDESTDIR
variable, useful for package builders, somake DESTDIR=tmp install
will install the files undertmp/usr/...
. -
You can now clean all the sources. (You can even erase them.)
make clean
If you wish to write plugins you must keep the Coq sources, without cleaning them. Therefore, to avoid a duplication of binaries and library, it is not necessary to do the installation step (6- above). You just have to tell it at configuration step (4- above) with the option -local :
./configure -profile devel <other options>
Then compile the sources as described in step 5 above. The resulting
binaries will reside in the subdirectory bin
, which is symlink to
the _build_vo/default/bin
directory.
Unless you pass the -nodebug
option to ./configure
, the -g
option of the OCaml compiler will be used during compilation to allow
debugging. See the debugging file in dev/doc
and the chapter 15 of
the Coq Reference Manual for details about how to use the OCaml
debugger with Coq.
There are two Coq commands:
coqtop The Coq toplevel
coqc The Coq compiler
For architectures where ocamlopt
is available, coqtop
is the
native code version of Coq. The byte-code version is coqtop.byte
,
which can be used for debugging. If native code isn't available,
coqtop
will point to coqtop.byte
. coqc
follows a similar scheme.
-
coqtop
launches Coq in the interactive mode. By default it loads basic logical definitions and tactics from the Init directory. -
coqc
allows compilation of Coq files directly from the command line. To compile a file foo.v, do:coqc foo.v
It will produce a file
foo.vo
, that you can now load through the Coq commandRequire
.A detailed description of these commands and of their options is given in the Reference Manual (which you can get in the doc/ directory, or read online on http://coq.inria.fr/doc/) and in the corresponding manual pages.
If you move both the binaries and the library in a consistent way, Coq should still be able to run. Otherwise, Coq may not be able to find the required prelude files and will give this error message:
Error during initialization :
Error: cannot guess a path for Coq libraries; please use -coqlib option
You can then indicate the location of the Coq's standard library using
the option -coqlib
:
coqtop -coqlib <new directory>
Some bytecode executables of Coq use the OCaml runtime, which
dynamically loads a shared library (.so
or .dll
). When it is not
installed properly, you can get an error message of this kind:
Fatal error: cannot load shared library dllcoqrun
Reason: dllcoqrun.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
In this case, you need either:
-
to set the
CAML_LD_LIBRARY_PATH
environment variable to point to the directory where dllcoqrun.so is; this is suitable when you want to run the command a limited number of times in a controlled environment (e.g. during compilation of binary packages); -
install dllcoqrun.so in a location listed in the file ld.conf that is in the directory of the standard library of OCaml;
-
recompile your bytecode executables after reconfiguring the location of the shared library:
./configure -vmbyteflags "-dllib,-lcoqrun,-dllpath,<path>" ...
where
<path>
is the directory where the dllcoqrun.so is installed; -
(not recommended) compile bytecode executables with a custom OCaml runtime by using:
./configure -custom ...
be aware that stripping executables generated this way, or performing other executable-specific operations, will make them useless.