ACL2 Version 8.5 Installation Guide

Easy Install for Unix-like Systems

Here, "Unix-like Systems" includes Unix, GNU-Linux, and MacOS X. Note that a quicker and even easier install may be possible, by instead obtaining a pre-built binary distribution if one is available for your platform. Otherwise, you can follow the directions below, which start by fetching a file hosted at the github ACL2 System and Books website. The result is a directory containing not only the ACL2 system but, in the books/ subdirectory, the community books (libraries). The ACL2 system is developed at the University of Texas at Austin and can also be obtained or explored separately.

Change to a directory whose full pathname contains no whitespace and which does not already contain a subdirectory named acl2 or acl2-8.5. Then use either of the following two methods to obtain the ACL2 source code and community books.
- (Recommended if you don't plan to update from git)
  Fetch gzipped tar file acl2-8.5.tar.gz from GitHub and then execute the following (the rm command is just to make sure you don't already have a subdirectory named acl2-8.5):
  rm -rf acl2-8.5
  tar xfz acl2-8.5.tar.gz
  This will create a subdirectory named acl2-8.5. Change to that directory.
- (Development snapshot, required if you want to update from GitHub)
  Execute the following (the rm command is just to make sure you don't already have a subdirectory named acl2):
  rm -rf acl2-8.5
  git clone https://github.com/acl2/acl2
  This will create the subdirectory acl2. Change to that directory.

Obtain a Common Lisp implementation if you don't already have one. (Note: Some of the ACL2 community books depend on quicklisp, and those are only guaranteed to work with CCL or SBCL.)

Type:
```
make LISP=<path_to_your_lisp_executable>
```
This will create a script in the current directory for running ACL2. The script is named saved_acl2.
Note: You will need Gnu make. We have seen problems on some Linux systems with Version 3.81 of that utility, so if you encounter errors, please consider our instructions for downloading and installing GNU make version 3.80.

Certify some books, for example with
```
make basic
```
or something fancier such as the following:
```
(time nice make -j 8 ACL2=/u/smith/bin/acl2 basic) >& make-basic.log
```
This may take only a few minutes, depending your -j value, your machine, and your host
Common Lisp. The resulting log should contain no occurrences of the string ``CERTIFICATION FAILED''; a normal exit (status 0) should guarantee this. If you want further options or additional explanation (e.g., you can certify many more books with make regression, and there is a discussion of avoiding root login), see the documentation for BOOKS-CERTIFICATION.

You now have an ACL2 executable called saved_acl2 (from step 3) and access to certified community books (from step 4). Enjoy!

THE ABOVE INSTRUCTIONS MAY BE ALL THAT YOU NEED. Otherwise, read on....

More Information

Note: To build variants of ACL2, see the documentation topic REAL for ACL2(r) and COMPILING-ACL2P for ACL2(p).