JuliaBerry

Julia for the Raspberry Pi.

JuliaBerry is an organisation that brings together various resources for using the Julia language for the Raspberry Pi.

Installation

Below, we go through three different methods of installing Julia on your Raspberry Pi.

The recommended way - Download the prebuilt binary

To install the newest available version of Julia, download the 32-bit (ARMv7-a hard float) prebuilt binary from the JuliaLang website. Below is a sequence of commands that can be copy pasted into the command-line on the Raspberry Pi to:

  1. Downloading julia 1.6.7 for the Raspberry Pi
  2. Unpacking the downloaded tar.gz file
  3. Deleting the compressed file
  4. Making a folder $HOME/.julia/my_installs
  5. Moving your Julia installation to $HOME/.julia/my_installs
curl https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/linux/armv7l/1.6/julia-1.6.7-linux-armv7l.tar.gz --output $HOME/julia-1.6.7-linux-armv7l.tar.gz
tar -xzf $HOME/julia-1.6.7-linux-armv7l.tar.gz
rm $HOME/julia-1.6.7-linux-armv7l.tar.gz
mkdir -p $HOME/.julia/my_installs
mv $HOME/julia-1.6.7 $HOME/.julia/my_installs

If you want to install a different version, or to a different directory, adjust the commands as you see fit.
Most users also want to add Julia to path. This is typically a manual step, and can be done in many ways. If you pasted exactly the lines above, you can add Julia to path by running the following commands:

echo '' >> $HOME/.profile
echo '#=== My own edits ===#' >> $HOME/.profile
echo 'PATH="$HOME/.julia/my_installs/julia-1.6.7/bin:$PATH"' >> $HOME/.profile

To load the version of $HOME/.profile with Julia on the path without restarting the shell, you can run

source $HOME/.profile

The easy way - Via apt

Julia 1.5.3 is available via apt in Raspberry Pi OS. This adds julia to PATH automatically:

sudo apt install julia

The hard way - Compiling Julia from source

This is the most difficult method, and is not needed if one of the methods above worked for you. Building Julia from source on a Raspberry Pi takes a very long time, and takes up a lot of storage. But for those who are interested in compiling Julia, instructions can be found over here.

Installing IJulia notebook

This is optional, and is only for those who need Jupyter Notebook.

Jupyter will need to be installed manually, as the automatic Conda installer does not work on the ARM architecture. Generally, running

sudo apt install libzmq3-dev
sudo pip3 install jupyter

at the shell should work. Then it should be sufficient to do

Pkg.add("IJulia")

at the Julia REPL.

Packages

The JuliaBerry org provides several Raspberry Pi-specific packages:

Getting Started with Julia

If you are new to Julia, welcome! We recommend heading over to julialand.org/learning to get started.

Questions/issues

We do not have a dedicated mailing list, however questions can be posted to the Julia Discourse.

Issues should be filed with the relevant packages on Github: if in doubt which package is appropriate, please ask on Discourse.

If you would like to contribute a new package to the JuliaBerry org, open an issue on the repository in question and ping @aviks or @simonbyrne.

If you have any comments or suggestions for the website, please open an issue here.