Install Julia on Ubuntu 20.04

Julia is an open-source, high-level, dynamically typed programming language. Julia is commonly used for numerical analysis and scientific computing.

This tutorial demonstrates how to install Julia on Ubuntu 20.04.

Install Julia

Get the latest version of Julia from GitHub. Also extract minor version (1.6.2 -> 1.6) and assign it to variable.

JULIA_VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/JuliaLang/julia/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "v\K[0-9.]+')
JULIA_MINOR_VERSION=$(echo $JULIA_VERSION | grep -Po "^[0-9]+.[0-9]+")

Above variables are used to download the latest version of Julia from official page:

curl -o julia.tar.gz "https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/linux/x64/${JULIA_MINOR_VERSION}/julia-${JULIA_VERSION}-linux-x86_64.tar.gz"

Create a new directory to store Julia and extract the tar.gz file:

sudo mkdir /opt/julia
sudo tar xf julia.tar.gz --strip-components=1 -C /opt/julia

In /usr/local/bin directory we can create a symbolic links to the commands located in Julia's bin directory:

sudo ln -s /opt/julia/bin/* /usr/local/bin

Now Julia will be available for all users as a system-wide command.

We can check Julia version:

julia --version

The tar.gz file is no longer necessary, remove it:

rm -rf julia.tar.gz

Testing Julia

Create a main.jl file:

nano main.jl

Add the following line of code:

println("Hello world")

Run script using julia command:

julia main.jl

Uninstall Julia

If you want to completely remove Julia, delete the installation directory:

sudo rm -rf /opt/julia

Remove symbolic links to the commands:

sudo find /usr/local/bin -lname '/opt/julia/bin/*' -delete