Five Minutes To Julia

How to quickly install and set up a professional Julia environment

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Need to get up and running with Julia fast?

This guide walks you through setting up a professional Julia development environment step-by-step. You’ll learn how to:

• Install Julia with juliaup.
• Set up the Julia VS Code extension.
• Create a shared dev environment with common development tools.
• Write a startup.jl file to automatically load the shared environment every time Julia launches.

Open up your terminal, and let’s dive in.

Install Julia With juliaup

You could download a Julia binary from julialang.org, but that’s boring.

All the cool kids use juliaup, a Julia "version multiplexer" inspired by the rustup project. With juliaup, you can install multiple Julia versions and switch between them from the command line. It'll even notify you in your terminal when a new Julia version is available.

To install juliaup, execute the command below that corresponds to your operating system:

macOS/Linux:

curl -fsSL https://install.julialang.org | sh

Windows:

winget install julia -s msstore

Run juliaup status to see every Julia version installed by juliaup. The latest version is already installed:

$ juliaup status
 Default  Channel  Version                         Update
----------------------------------------------------------
       *  release  1.8.5+0.aarch64.apple.darwin14

You can learn more about juliaup from the project's README on GitHub.

Set Up The Julia VS Code Extension

You can use Julia with your preferred code editor. But if you want an IDE experience, your best option is VS Code. The same folks behind juliaup maintain the official Julia VS Code extension.

Download and install VS Code if you haven’t already. Then, open VS Code and click on the Extensions tab in the Activity Bar: