Installing and Running Julia

Installing and Running Julia#

Standard Installation#

Installing Julia is very easy, as it comes with its own version manager juliaup:

  • Go to the Julia install page

  • Download and install juliaup for your platform (it can also be found in the Arch User Repository)

Note: You can still download julia versions manually, but this is no longer recommended. tarballs can be found here.

Using juliaup#

The usage is generally similar to and inspired by rustup:

  • Install a julia version: juliaup add <version>, for example lts, release, nightly, or a specific version number

  • List all available versions to install: juliaup list

  • Set a default version: juliaup default <version>

  • Update installed versions: juliaup up

  • Update juliaup itself: juliaup self update

For the purpose of this tutorial, use lts (currently 1.10) or release (currently 1.11).

Running Julia#

Running julia starts juliaup’s default version:

➜  ~ julia
               _
   _       _ _(_)_     |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org
  (_)     | (_) (_)    |
   _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
  | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
  | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 1.11.6 (2025-07-09)
 _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official https://julialang.org/ release
|__/                   |

julia>

You can start a specific installed julia version using julia +<version>

You will be to now type Julia commands in a standard REPL environment: read, evaluate, print, loop.

This is an almost exact Julia analogue of Python’s ipython.

julia> println("hello, world!")
hello, world!

julia> (2+3)^2
25

julia>

Notebooks#

Julia will run in a Jupyter notebook environment, e.g., using Jupyter Lab or in VS Code

Julia Scripts#

Finally, let’s just observe that Julia scripts work just as one would expect:

#! /usr/bin/env julia

function main()
    println("hello, world! let's calculate a sum of squares")

    total = 0
    for i in 1:10
        total += i^2
    end

    println("The answer is $(total)")
end

main()

So let’s execute that:

$ julia julia-script.jl
hello, world! let's calculate a sum of squares
The answer is 385
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