Installation

See also: Build Tiers · FAQ & Troubleshooting · CLI Overview · Programmer's Guide

---

1. Download and install milk

[!WARNING] This page describes installation of the core package milk. If you install an application package (cacao or coffee), replace "milk" with "cacao" in these instructions.

For download, build commands, and CMake options, see the Quick Start section in README.md.

For configuring minimal or partial builds (engine-only, core without cfitsio, etc.), see Build Tiers.

The sections below cover post-installation setup, dependencies, and optional configuration not covered in the README.

2. Post-installation

You may need to add /usr/local/lib to the linker search path:

$ echo "/usr/local/lib" > usrlocal.conf
$ sudo mv usrlocal.conf /etc/ld.so.conf.d/
$ sudo ldconfig -v

3. tmpfs (optional)

Create a tmpfs disk for high-performance shared-memory I/O:

$ echo "tmpfs /milk/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
$ sudo mkdir -p /milk/shm
$ sudo mount /milk/shm

---

4. Dependencies

4.1. Required (full build)

Dependency	Purpose
gcc	C compiler (C17)
cmake ≥ 3.10	Build system
pkg-config	Locates installed libraries
pthreads	POSIX threading (provided by libc)

Optional dependencies

4.2. Optional

Dependency	CMake option	Default	Purpose
cfitsio	USE_CFITSIO	ON	FITS file I/O (COREMOD_iofits)
readline	USE_READLINE	ON	Interactive CLI line editing
ncurses	USE_NCURSES	ON	TUI screens (fpsCTRL, procCTRL, streamCTRL)
GSL	USE_GSL	ON	Numerical routines in plugins
fftw3	—	auto	FFT (used by some plugins)
openMP	—	auto	Parallel processing

💡 Tip: For a minimal POSIX-only build, all optional dependencies can be skipped. See Build Tiers for details.

Package installation commands

Ubuntu / Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install \
    libcfitsio-dev libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev \
    libfftw3-dev libgsl-dev

CentOS / RHEL / Fedora:

$ sudo yum install \
    cfitsio-devel readline-devel ncurses-devel \
    fftw3-devel gsl-devel

cfitsio from source (alternative)

If your distribution does not package cfitsio, install it from source:

1. Download from HEASARC
2. Build and install:

$ tar xzf cfitsio-*.tar.gz
$ cd cfitsio-*
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$ make
$ sudo make install

GPU acceleration (optional)

For GPU-accelerated linear algebra:

• Install NVIDIA driver and CUDA toolkit
• Install MAGMA

If cmake reports "No package 'magma' found", add the MAGMA pkg-config path to your shell profile:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/magma/lib/pkgconfig

---

Running multiple versions side by side

⚠️ Warning: Untested — may require tweaking.

Install independent versions by specifying different prefixes:

$ cd ~/src
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/milk-org/milk milk-1
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/milk-org/milk milk-2

$ cd ~/src/milk-1/_build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/milk-1 ..
$ sudo make install

$ cd ~/src/milk-2/_build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/milk-2 ..
$ sudo make install

Make version 1 the system default:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/milk-1 /usr/local/milk

Run version 2 explicitly:

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/milk-2/lib \
  PATH=/usr/local/milk-2/bin \
  milk-cli

Each version can also use its own shared-memory directory:

$ MILK_SHM_DIR=/milk-2/shm \
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/milk-2/lib \
  PATH=/usr/local/milk-2/bin \
  milk-cli

---

← Documentation Index