Grew installation

Grew is implemented using the Ocaml language and can be installed on Linux or Mac OS X (installation on Windows should be possible, but this is untested). A Python binding is also available, which can be found here.

You have to install:

1. opam which is the standard package manager for Ocaml
2. ocaml which can be installed by opam
3. grew an related libraries which are available as opam packages

If you just need to upgrade your installation, please refer to the Upgrade section.

⚠️ If you encounter any issues while using the instructions on this page, please do not hesitate to open an issue on GitHub.

Step 1: Install opam

Grew requires opam version 2.0.0 or higher. In case of trouble installing opam, please consult opam installation page.

Linux

Opam version 2 can be installed from default packages in most recent Linux distributions.

apt-get install opam

The following commands install a few other necessary packages:

apt-get install wget m4 unzip librsvg2-bin curl bubblewrap

Mac OS X

• Install XCode

• Install the package manager Brew

• brew install aspcud

• brew install opam

Step 2: Setup opam

Run:

• opam init
• opam switch create 5.2.0 Install a recent version of Ocaml (5.2.0 was released on 2024-05-13)
• as adviced by the previous command: eval $(opam env) or start a new terminal

Check that ocaml is installed with ocamlc -v. This gives you the version of Ocaml installed. This should be 4.13 or higher.

Step 3: Install the Grew software

To add the Grew-specific opam repository, run the following command:

opam remote add grew "https://opam.grew.fr"

opam install grew

To verify your installation:

• Try running command grew version. Ensure that the version is 1.16 (refer to the Upgrade page if necessary)
• If you encounter any issues, try running eval $(opam env) and then reinstalling grew using opam install grew.
• If the issue persists, please submit an issue

NB: If you want to install the Python library, see here.

Grew upgrade

To upgrade to a newer version of Grew, run the following commands:

opam update
opam upgrade

The latest version is 1.16. You can check your version with

opam list | grep grew

you should obtain (the third line may not appear if you haven’t installed the Python library backend):

grew                          1.16.0      Grew system
grewlib                       1.16.2      The main library for the Grew system
grewpy_backend                0.5.4       The Ocaml backend for the `grewpy` Python lib