View on GitHub

IRAF Community Distribution

IRAF maintained by the community

Home | Installation | Packages | X11IRAF | PyRAF | Forum ↗

GitHub release

Binary packages

Linux

Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian, …)

On Debian like systems, IRAF and xgterm can be installed directly from the standard package repositories and can be installed with the command

$ sudo apt install iraf xgterm

This also installs the NOAO package. Development tools (xc, mkpkg and development libraries) can be installed separately if needed with the package iraf-dev. PyRAF is available as python3-pyraf package.

Depending on the distribution, there are also some external packages available as iraf-fitsutil, iraf-mscred, iraf-rvsao, iraf-sptable, iraf-st4gem, iraf-wcstools and iraf-xdimsum.

Other distributions

On Mageia Linux, IRAF can also be directly installed from the package repositories. Packages for Fedora Linux are available from the RPM Sphere third-party repository.

Please contact us if you want to help packaging for macOS or other Linux versions.

macOS

For macOS, a beta release of the installer is available. Please download the installer (~100 MB) for your system:

Keep in mind that the installer is a beta release and contact us in case of installation problems.

After downloading, open the installer package by right-clicking on the icon and selecting Open. As the software is not signed with an Apple certificate, a window will show with a warning that the package comes from an unidentified packager. Click on Open to continue.

welcome window

Follow now the installer instructions by clicking on Continue. In the Installation Type screen, adjust the list of packages for your needs. Aside from the main IRAF package and X11IRAF, a selection of external packages is offered. The st4gem package offers a number of tasks from the discontinued STSDAS package and can be used as an alternative.

installation type window

IRAF will be installed under /usr/local/lib/iraf/ and the installer will ask you for the root password of the machine. At the end you will see a screen like this:

summary window

If X11IRAF was selected, two new applications, xgterm and ximtool are installed:

X11IRAF applications

For these applications, you will need an X server (XQuartz). As an alternative image display, most people install SAOImageDS9. For development, the XCode command line tools are needed.

Installation from source

System Requirements and Dependencies

The distributed binaries require the readline or libedit, curl, expat, and zlib libraries to be installed.

On Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint, Devuan, Raspbian etc.):

$ sudo apt install gcc make flex bison zlib1g-dev
$ sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev libexpat-dev libreadline-dev

On Fedora and its derivatives (Redhat, Scientific Linux etc.)

$ sudo dnf install gcc make perl flex bison zlib-devel
$ sudo dnf install libcurl-devel expat-devel readline-devel

On MacOS X, you need to have the XCode tools installed. If you haven’t, you can install them with:

$ xcode-select --install

Click “Install” to download and install Xcode Command Line Tools.

Download and unpack the IRAF Distribution

IRAF v2.17.1 source code is available from Github at

https://github.com/iraf-community/iraf/archive/refs/tags/v2.17.1.tar.gz

The source distribution file is built as a tarball with the package name and version as base directory. Thus, distribution files can be unpacked with the command

$ tar zxf /<path>/v2.17.1.tar.gz
$ cd iraf-2.17.1/

Build from Sources

Now you can compile IRAF on your system with the command

$ make 2>&1 | tee build.log

The following IRAF architectures are supported:

Architecture Operating system Supported CPU types
linux64 Linux 64 bit x86_64, arm64, mips64, ppc64, riscv64, alpha
linux Linux 32 bit i386, x32, arm, mips
macos64 macOS 64 bit arm64
macintel macOS 64 bit x86_64
macosx macOS 32 bit i386
freebsd64 FreeBSD 64 bit x86_64
freebsd FreeBSD 32 bit i386, arm
hurd GNU HURD 32 bit i386

Note that Cygwin and big endian architectures like macosx/ppc are not supported anymore.

Test the Build

IRAF comes with a small set of basic tests to ensure that the build works fine. To execute the tests, run:

$ make test

The output should look like

ecl.e: README.md
ecl.e: files.md ......
ecl.e: images.imcoords.md ...........
ecl.e: images.imfilter.md .x............
ecl.e: images.imfit.md ...
ecl.e: images.imgeom.md ........
ecl.e: images.immatch.md ..
ecl.e: lists.md .......
ecl.e: noao.astutil.md ........
ecl.e: noao.digiphot.photcal.md .
ecl.e: numerical-recipes.md ..........
ecl.e: os.md ..
ecl.e: programming.md ............
ecl.e: sys.vops.md .
ecl.e: test-syntax.md ...xs.
ecl.e: testproc.md ..........................
ecl.e: utilities.nttools.md ..............
Test summary:  128 passed
   1 skipped
   2 xfailed

Note that xfailed (x) are expected failures, which one does not need to worry about.

For details of the tests, see the file test/README.md.

Install the software at its final place

There are two options to install the build: system wide (by default under /usr/local/lib/iraf), or in-place for the current user only. If you have root (sudo, admin) access, the system wide installation is the preferred option.

System wide installation

The system wide installation copies everything that is needed to /usr/local/lib/iraf, making it available for all users of the computer. For this, do the following command:

$ sudo make install

This also installs the links required to run iraf or its commands to /usr/local/bin. After the installation finishes, one can directly start using

$ mkiraf
$ ecl

Note that the mkiraf command is now optional if a local parameter storage is not needed. Setting the iraf environment variable is not needed to run the system.

In-place installation

The in-place installation just configures the built system in its current location.

$ make inplace

This also installs the links required to run iraf or its commands to ~/.iraf/bin. This directory should be added to your PATH variable so that the IRAF commands can be found by their name. Different to previous versions, the installation does not touch your login files; you should edit these files manually to add the path if needed. Setting the iraf environment variable is not needed to run the system.

Customization variables

Build customization

The build using make can be customized by a number of environment variables:

Installation customization

The installation using make install recognizes the following environment variables: