Install Apertium core by compiling

Either you are planning to work on Apertium core, or have an operating system not covered by packaging, or virtual environments (check the Install overview).

Unix (GNU/Linux, Apple, BSD)

The below instructions are built from GNU/Linux material, but should be much the same on Apple, BSD, and other Unix-like systems.

If you are on an Apple system, you may want to look at Prerequisites for Mac OS X then Apertium on Mac OS X before returning here.

Install the prerequisites

Install prerequisites,

• *nix (in general)

Notes for different systems

These notes have been made at different times. Some may be out-of-date. However, if you are having difficulties, they may contain some tips,

• Ubuntu / Debian / other Debian-based
• RHEL / CentOS / Fedora / OpenSUSE
• openSUSE
• Mac OS X
• Arch Linux
• Gentoo
• FreeBSD (untested)
• Slackware
• SliTaz
• Mageia
• Alpine

Use git to download the code

The main code,

git clone https://github.com/apertium/lttoolbox.git
git clone https://github.com/apertium/apertium.git
git clone https://github.com/apertium/apertium-lex-tools.git

• Note: Please make sure that the directory where you put these files (i.e. where you run the git command) doesn't contain spaces and other special characters. That may cause errors while compiling/linking.

Set up environment

By default, Apertium is installed under the directory /usr/local, which requires root (sudo) access when installing. If that's fine with you, begin by pasting these lines into your terminal:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH

You should also put those lines in your ~/.bashrc so you don't have to paste them into every terminal you open.

However, if you want Apertium installed somewhere else or don't want to install it as root, instead paste these lines into your terminal:

PREFIX=$HOME/local # or wherever you want apertium stuff installed
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PREFIX/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PREFIX/lib/pkgconfig:${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH

You should also put those lines in your ~/.bashrc so you don't have to paste them into every terminal you open.

Configure, build and install

The next step is to configure, build and install each of the modules you checked out, in this order:

1. lttoolbox
2. apertium
3. apertium-lex-tools

cd to each of the directories before you run the the commands shown below.

If you didn't specify $PREFIX above, or don't know what this means, then do this in each directory,

./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

When doing this, you might encounter a "cannot find pkg-config" error or something similar. You can solve this by installing pkg-config: sudo apt-get install pkg-config

If you specified a $PREFIX (e.g. to avoid installing as root), then you need to reset the prefix on 'autogen', so do this in each directory,

./autogen.sh --prefix=$PREFIX
make
make install
ldconfig -n $PREFIX/lib

(If you're on a Mac, you don't need to do ldconfig, don't worry that it fails.)

To compile process-tagger-output, do this in apertium-lex-tools directory,

cd scripts
make

To install IRSTLM or yasmet along with apertium-lex-tools, add --with-yasmet and --with-irstlm to ./autogen.sh for yasmet and IRSTLM respectively

If you had any trouble, see Installation troubleshooting.

Windows

If you do not want to use the Apertium VirtualBox, you can compile Apertium for Windows using Cygwin; documentation for how to compile on Windows manually is at Apertium on Windows.

There is also a script at Apertium guide for Windows users, but it is currently out-of-date and in need of updating.

Troubleshooting

Compiles go wrong. Of course they do,

• Search the page Installation Troubleshooting for your error message.

Continuing

One way to test you have something, immediately, it to try invoke a tool. Without language data you can't see a translation, but you can see the help. Try,

lt-proc

If you know you need the HFST or CG3 modules, see Installation of grammar libraries. You may also be interested in the many tips at Bash completion.

You may want to write a new language pair, but you could download a language pair to test the install. Follow the instructions for Install language data by compiling. Or, if your system has packaging, download a language package (but beware, a package manager may pull in a old package of Apertium core, too).