Installing Catala on your machine

Disclaimer

Currently, Catala is only available through source building. We plan to package Catala as binaries in the future, which will greatly ease the installation process.

Catala is a programming language primarily designed to be installed on your machine and run locally in your favorite development environment. Materially, Catala is comprised of several executables that together complete the tooling for the programming language:

  • the Catala compiler catala, together with the build system clerk;
  • the Catala Language Server Protocol (LSP) server catala-lsp;
  • the Catala auto formatting tool catala-format;
  • the Catala plugin for your text editor or IDE.

Under the hood, most of these executables are produced using the OCaml software toolchain, so the installation process begins with opam, the package and build system for OCaml.

The installation instructions all assume proficiency with the command line and basic knowledge about the filesystem and the general process of building executables from sources using a package manager.

The installation failed, what can I do?

If your installation failed even though you were following the installation guide, please file an issue or start a thread on the Catala community online chat.

In your issue or post, please provide:

  • your platform and operating system;
  • a log of the commands you executed with their command line output.

The installation instructions are different whether you are on an Unix-compatible system (Linux, MacOS, Windows Subsystem for Linux), or on plain Windows. Please pick the appropriate guide for your situation.

Important information

During the installation steps several prompts might occur, choosing the default option (by pressing enter each time) or answering yes (by typing y then enter) is enough.