Install from Pre-built Binaries

Installation from a pre-built binary tarball is an easy and fast way to install Sage. Note that on GNU/Linux a preferred way is to use your package manager (e.g. apt, pacman, yum).

In all cases, we assume that you have a computer with at least 4 GB of free disk space.

Download Guide

Not sure what to download? Just follow these steps.

  • Determine your operating system (Windows, Linux or macOS).

  • According to your operating system, go to the appropriate Download section of the SageMath website.

  • Choose a download server (aka mirror) that is close to your location.

  • Download the binary that is appropriate to your system. Depending on your operating system you might need additional information such as your CPU type (e.g. 64 bits or 32 bits) and your operating system version. If you use macOS you will have the choice between a tarball (whose names ends with tar.bz2) and two kinds of mountable disk images (whose names end with app.dmg and simply .dmg). Except for Windows, the naming scheme of the files is always sage-VERSION-OS-CPU.EXTENSION where EXTENSION can be tar.gz, tar.bz2, dmg or app.dmg.

  • Then choose the appropriate section below corresponding to your situation.

Linux

Make sure that you have an SSL library installed (OpenSSL recommended).

It is highly recommended that you have LaTeX installed. If you want to view animations, you should install either ImageMagick or ffmpeg. ImageMagick or dvipng is also used for displaying some LaTeX output in the notebooks.

Choose an appropriate directory where to install Sage. If you have administrator rights on your computer a good choice is /opt otherwise it can be anywhere in your home directory. Avoid spaces and Unicode characters in the path name.

Next, download the latest binary tarball available (see “Download Guide” above). The tarball name should end with .tar.gz or .tar.bz2. If you want to use the .dmg or .app.dmg for macOS switch to the next section.

Unpack the tarball where you intend to install Sage. This is done from the command line using the tar program. Next, to launch Sage, go to the SageMath directory and run the program that is called sage (via ./sage on the command line).

The first time you run Sage, you will see a message like

Rewriting paths for your new installation directory
===================================================

This might take a few minutes but only has to be done once.

patching ...  (long list of files)

At this point, you can no longer move your Sage installation and expect Sage to function.

Once you are able to launch Sage you might want to create a shortcut so that sage just works from the command line. To do so simply use the ln program from the command line:

$ sudo ln -s /path/to/SageMath/sage /usr/local/bin/sage

where /path/to/SageMath/sage is the actual path to your SageMath installation.

macOS

On macOS there are two possible binaries for each version. They can be recognized by their suffixes, but their actual contents are identical.

  • tar.bz2: a binary tarball

  • dmg: a compressed image of the binary

This section explains how to install from dmg. For the installation of the binary tarball tar.bz2 just follow the steps of the Linux installation.

After downloading the file, double click on the dmg file to mount it, which will take some time. Then drag the folder SageMath that just appeared to /Applications/. You might want to have shortcuts so that sage in the console simply works out of the box. For that purpose, follows the steps at the end of the section “Linux”.

Alternative macOS binaries are available here. These have been signed and notarized, eliminating various errors caused by Apple’s gatekeeper antimalware protections.

Microsoft Windows (Cygwin)

SageMath on Windows requires a 64-bit Windows (which is likely to be the case on a modern computer). If you happen to have a 32-bit Windows, you can consider the alternatives mentioned at the end of Welcome to the SageMath Installation Guide.

To install SageMath on Windows, just download the installer (see the above “Download Guide” section) and run it.