APT Packages

Drake publishes pre-compiled binaries as APT packages (*.deb) for the Ubuntu operating system. Refer to Supported Configurations for additional compatibility details.

To learn about other installation methods, refer to Installation and Quickstart.

If you experience any problems with or have questions about Drake, please ask for help.

Drake binary releases incorporate a pre-compiled version of SNOPT as part of the Mathematical Program toolbox. Thanks to Philip E. Gill and Elizabeth Wong for their kind support.

Drake’s apt packages do not support the Gurobi solver. To use Gurobi, you will need to build Drake from source following the instructions in Source Installation.

If you are using a minimal cloud or container image, you may need to install the following packages before continuing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends ca-certificates wget

Stable Releases

APT packages (*.deb) are available to download as attachments from Drake’s GitHub releases page.

The most recent release is v1.53.0:

To download and install the drake-dev package:

wget -O drake-dev.deb https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake/releases/download/v1.53.0/drake-dev_1.53.0-1_$(dpkg-query --show '--showformat=${Architecture-Variant}\n${Architecture}\n' libc6 | grep -m 1 .)-$(. /etc/os-release && echo $VERSION_CODENAME).deb
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends ./drake-dev.deb

Most content installs to /opt/drake, so setting the following environment variables may be useful:

export PATH="/opt/drake/bin${PATH:+:${PATH}}"
export PYTHONPATH="/opt/drake/lib/python$(python3 -c 'import sys; print("{0}.{1}".format(*sys.version_info))')/site-packages${PYTHONPATH:+:${PYTHONPATH}}"

Refer to Quickstart for next steps.

Nightly Releases

Nightly apt packages are available to download at:

Older packages for specific dates are available by replacing latest with date YYYYMMDD preceded with 0.0.. For example,

Nightly packages are retained for 56 days from their date of creation.

To download and install the drake-dev package from a nightly build:

wget -O drake-dev.deb https://drake-packages.csail.mit.edu/drake/nightly/drake-dev_latest-1_$(dpkg-query --show '--showformat=${Architecture-Variant}\n${Architecture}\n' libc6 | grep -m 1 .)-$(. /etc/os-release && echo $VERSION_CODENAME).deb
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends ./drake-dev.deb

APT site (Ubuntu 24.04 only)

For backwards compatibility for Ubuntu 24.04 on amd64 only, Drake offers an APT site that you can add to your sources.list to automatically install the newest version of Drake’s stable releases.

To add the Drake APT repository to your machine and install the drake-dev package, please do the following in order.

Download a copy of the Drake GPG signing key and add it to an APT trusted keychain:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends \
  ca-certificates gnupg wget
wget -qO- https://drake-apt.csail.mit.edu/drake.asc | gpg --dearmor - \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/drake.gpg >/dev/null

Add the Drake repository to your APT sources list:

echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://drake-apt.csail.mit.edu/noble noble main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/drake.list >/dev/null

Update your local APT package index and install the drake-dev package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends drake-dev

Most content installs to /opt/drake, so setting the following environment variables may be useful:

export PATH="/opt/drake/bin${PATH:+:${PATH}}"
export PYTHONPATH="/opt/drake/lib/python$(python3 -c 'import sys; print("{0}.{1}".format(*sys.version_info))')/site-packages${PYTHONPATH:+:${PYTHONPATH}}"

Refer to Quickstart for next steps.