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. As the dependencies for the GUI changed as of version 9.3.26, we split the dependencies in two

Non-GUI dependencies

dnf install \
  gcc gcc-c++ \
  cmake \
  ninja-build \
  gperftools-devel \
  freetype-devel \
  gmp-devel \
  java-latest-openjdk-devel \
  javapackages-bootstrap \
  jpackage-utils \
  junit \
  ncurses-devel \
  openssl-devel \
  pkgconfig \
  readline-devel \
  libedit-devel \
  libdb-devel \
  unixODBC-devel \
  zlib-devel \
  uuid-devel \
  libarchive-devel \
  libyaml-devel \
  python3-devel

GUI dependencies

For SWI-Prolog 9.3.26 or later, the GUI dependencies are below. SDL3 is part of Fedora 42. For older versions you have to build SDL3 and SDL3_image from source. See Porting to linux distros without SDL3

dnf install \
  dnf install SDL3-devel SDL3_image-devel cairo-devel pango-devel

Up to SWI-Prolog 9.3.25, the GUI dependencies are

dnf install \
  libICE-devel \
  libjpeg-turbo-devel \
  libSM-devel \
  libX11-devel \
  libXaw-devel \
  libXext-devel \
  libXft-devel \
  libXrandr-devel \
  libXinerama-devel \
  libXmu-devel \
  libXpm-devel \
  libXrender-devel \
  libXt-devel \
  rgb

Adding the Qt console (versions older than 9.3.26)

The Qt GUI application swipl-win can be added by installing the Qt dependencies:

sudo dnf install qt6-devel qt6-qtbase-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.