There are PPAs for SWI-Prolog stable and SWI-Prolog development based on the official Debian packaging structure and corresponding SWI-Prolog release. This PPA version can be installed using the commands below in Ubuntu linux. The .deb package may run on some closely related Linux distributions. Otherwise either use the (often outdated) package from our distribution, compile from source or using the SNAP version.

These PPAs are updated with every new release. Thanks to Yves Raimond for setting up the PPA snd Eugeniy Meshcheryakov for creating the Debian configuration. The PPA is registered using apt-add-repository, which is by default available on desktops, but not on servers or Linux containers. It is installed using:

% sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

Stable versions

% sudo apt-add-repository ppa:swi-prolog/stable
% sudo apt-get update
% sudo apt-get install swi-prolog

Development versions

% sudo apt-add-repository ppa:swi-prolog/devel
% sudo apt-get update
% sudo apt-get install swi-prolog

Installing debug symbols

If Prolog crashes and notably for debugging crashes when you embed SWI-Prolog or add foreign extensions, it is useful to have the debug symbols. Please install the debug symbols if you encounter a reproducible crash and include the stack trace in the bug report.

As of versions 8.4.3/8.5.13 these are available. To install these, edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/swi-prolog-ubuntu-<version>.list, duplicate the deb line and add /debug. The file now may look like this (for the stable version on Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy)).

deb https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/swi-prolog/stable/ubuntu/ jammy main
deb https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/swi-prolog/stable/ubuntu/ jammy main/debug

Next, run these commands to get the debug symbols of the core Prolog system. The -dbgsym` packages are also available for the various additional packages.

% sudo apt update
% sudo apt install swi-prolog-nox-dbgsym