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Getting Started

This page covers the installation of Polymake.jl and where to find help.

Installation

The installation can be done in the Julia's REPL by executing

julia> using Pkg; Pkg.add("Polymake")

This will fetch a pre-built binary of polymake. You are ready to start using Polymake.

Note: Pre-built binaries are available for the Linux and macOS platform, but the macOS binaries are considered experimental. Windows users are encouraged to try running Julia inside Window Subsystem for Linux and reporting back ;)

Note: Pre-built polymake will use a separate .polymake config directory (usually joinpath(homedir(), ".julia", "polymake_user")).

Your own installation of polymake

If you already have a recent enough version of polymake (i.e. >=4.0) on your system and you want to use this version of polymake, you either need to

  • set the environment variable POLYMAKE_CONFIG=yes and make polymake-config available in your PATH or
  • set the environment variable POLYMAKE_CONFIG to the full path of the polymake-config executable.

After this just add the package as above (or build if the package has been already added), the build script will use your polymake installation.

polymake from source

A compatible version is available at polymake/polymake. It can be compiled as follows where GIT_FOLDER and INSTALL_FOLDER have to be substituted with your favorite folders. Please note that these need to be absolute paths. Also make sure to check the necessary dependencies as well as the additional instructions for Macs.

export POLYMAKE_GIT=GIT_FOLDER
export POLYMAKE_INSTALL=INSTALL_FOLDER
git clone git@github.com:polymake/polymake $POLYMAKE_GIT
cd $POLYMAKE_GIT
./configure --prefix=$POLYMAKE_INSTALL
ninja -C build/Opt
ninja -C build/Opt install
export POLYMAKE_CONFIG=$POLYMAKE_INSTALL/bin/polymake-config

Note that polymake might take some time to compile.

After this start Julia and follow the instructions above.

Note: Self-built polymake will use the standard .polymake config directory (usually $HOME/.polymake).

Polymake.jl in a separate environment:

mkdir my_new_env
cd my_new_env

Then start Julia in the directory and press ] for pkg mode.

(v1.3) pkg> activate .
(Polymake) pkg> dev --local Polymake
(Polymake) pkg> build Polymake # fetches the prebuild polymake binaries
(Polymake) pkg> test Polymake # and You are good to go!

If polymake-config is in your PATH, or POLYMAKE_CONFIG environment variable is set the build phase will try to use it.

Just remember that You need to activate Polymake.jl to use Polymake.

Getting Help

For basic information on the usage of Polymake.jl we refer to the other sections of this documentation.

For further details on polymake and its abilities see the Polymake User Guide.