There are several ways to build SWI-Prolog for MacOS. First of all, you need basic development tools such as a C-compiler, CMake, etc. SWI-Prolog both compiles using MacOS Xcode clang and gcc. Notably on Intel Macs, gcc produces significantly faster (up to 40%) code.

Using Macports

Building SWI-Prolog for MacOS requires Macports. The Portfile specifications are updated with any new stable and development release. If you are a Macport user, SWI-Prolog can be installed simply using one of the commands below. The first installs the stable version and the second the development version. Note that most of the time developers are better of using the development version. This is currently in particular true as the development version support native MacOS Quartz graphics while the stable version (9.2.x) requires the XQuartz X11 application.

port install swi-prolog
port install swi-prolog-devel

If you like to keep nice and lean system (i.e., if you do not want Macports copies of X11, ODBC, etc), you still need to install several prerequisites. First:

1. Xcode (can be installed as a free app from the appstore)
2. Macports (download from https://www.macports.org/)
3. For versions up to 9.3.25, XQuartz (download from https://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/)

Next, you must install the following Macport libraries for a complete build. For versions up to 9.3.35

port install cmake ninja gmp jpeg libarchive libiconv libmcrypt ncurses \
        openssl ossp-uuid pkgconfig readline zlib pcre db62 libedit \
    fontconfig libyaml unixODBC openjdk17 junit hamcrest-core

For version 9.3.26 or later

port install cmake ninja gmp libarchive libmcrypt ncurses \
        openssl ossp-uuid pkgconfig zlib pcre db62 libedit \
    libyaml unixODBC openjdk17 junit hamcrest-core \
        SDL3 SDL3_image cairo pango

Notes

• If you want JPL (the Java interface) you can also install the Oracle JDK. As Oracle gets increasingly annoying about agreeing with their license and as of version 10 creating an account with Oracle, we switched to OpenJDK. Versions before 9 have a bug that causes the Mac to think you have no JRE when accessing Java through JNI.

Next, you can download SWI-Prolog as a source archive or using GIT. After installing all dependencies SWI-Prolog can be build according to the generic instructions using cmake that can be found here

Using Homebrew

Homebrew provides an alternative to Macports. The command below installs the latest stable version of SWI-Prolog:

brew install swi-prolog

The latest git version of SWI-Prolog can be installed with this command:

brew install swi-prolog --HEAD

(contributed by Rinke Hoekstra)

Building from source using Homebrew for dependencies

As of version 7.7.21 the SWI-Prolog sources are fully compatible for building with dependencies provided by Homebrew. The dependencies can be installed using

brew install \
     cmake \
     ninja \
     gmp \
     openssl \
     libarchive \
     readline \
     ossp-uuid \
     libyaml \
     unixodbc \
     berkeley-db \
     pcre \
     jpeg

For SWI-Prolog 9.3.26 or later, you need the following additional dependencies to build the GUI tools

brew install sdl3 sdl3_image cairo pango libedit pkgconf

Brew does not provide junit.jar which is needed to run the JPL (Java interface) tests. If you want to test this get junit.jar as described in https://github.com/junit-team/junit4/wiki/download-and-install and install in /usr/local/share/java/junit.jar.

After installing all dependencies SWI-Prolog can be build according to the generic instructions using cmake that can be found here

See also

- The Portfile