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Installation on Linux Platforms

Follow these steps to install GraalVM Community Edition on the Linux operating system.

  1. Navigate to the GraalVM Releases repository on GitHub. Select Java 11 based or Java 17 based distribution for the Linux AMD64 architecture, and download.
  2. Change the directory to the location where you want to install GraalVM, then move the .tar.gz archive to it.
  3. Unzip the archive: 
    tar -xzf graalvm-ce-java<version>-linux-amd64-<version>.tar.gz
  4. There can be multiple JDKs installed on the machine. The next step is to configure the runtime environment:
    • Point the PATH environment variable to the GraalVM Enterprise bin directory: 
        export PATH=/path/to/<graalvm>/bin:$PATH
    • Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to resolve to the installation directory: 
        export JAVA_HOME=/path/to/<graalvm>
  5. To check whether the installation was successful, run the java -version command.

Optionally, you can specify GraalVM as the default JRE or JDK installation in your Java IDE.

For Oracle GraalVM Enterprise Edition users, find the installation instructions here.

Supported Functionalities

The base distribution of GraalVM Community Edition for Linux (AMD64) platforms includes OpenJDK with the GraalVM compiler enabled, LLVM and JavaScript runtimes. The base installation can be extended with:

Tools/Utilities:

  • Native Image – a technology to compile an application ahead-of-time into a native executable
  • LLVM toolchain – a set of tools and APIs for compiling native programs to bitcode that can be executed with on the GraalVM runtime

Runtimes:

  • Java on Truffle – a Java Virtual Machine implementation based on a Truffle interpreter for GraalVM
  • Node.js – Node.js v16.14.2 compatible
  • Python – Python 3.8.5 compatible
  • Ruby – Ruby 3.0.2 compatible
  • R – GNU R 4.0.3 compatible
  • Wasm – WebAssembly (Wasm) ​ These runtimes are not part of the GraalVM Community base distribution and must be installed separately.

To assist a user with installation, GraalVM includes GraalVM Updater, a command line utility to install and manage additional functionalities. Proceed to the installation steps to add any necessary language runtime or utility from above to GraalVM.