Installation via Direct Download

Binary Packages

Drake publishes pre-compiled binaries as binary downloads (*.tar.gz) for all supported operating systems. Refer to Supported Configurations for 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 binary releases do not support the Gurobi solver. To use Gurobi, you will need to build Drake from source following the instructions in Source Installation.

Stable Releases

Binary packages of Drake for Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) and Mac are available to download as attachments from Drake’s GitHub releases page.

The most recent release is v1.28.0:

Users of macOS must download using a command-line tool such as curl instead of using a web browser, to avoid hassles from Gatekeeper checks for malicious software. For example:

curl -fsSLO https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake/releases/download/v1.28.0/drake-1.28.0-mac-arm64.tar.gz

Use as a C++ library

For an example of using a Drake *.tar.gz image from a CMake project, refer to the drake_cmake_installed example.

Use as a Python library

In most cases we suggest installation via pip because that will be more convenient than manually downloading. However, if you are running on macOS arm64 or if you need both C++ and Python API support, then pip will not work. This section shows how to incorporate a manual download into a virtual environment directory. In the example below, we will name that directory env, but you can choose any name.

Download the binary release *.tar.gz file, using one of the links above. In the example below, we’ll use drake.tar.gz to refer to it, but your download will have a more version-specific filename.

Create and activate the environment:

mkdir -p env
tar -xvzf drake.tar.gz -C env --strip-components=1
python3 -m venv env --system-site-packages
source env/bin/activate

Install dependencies within the environment:

env/share/drake/setup/install_prereqs

(On Ubuntu, the script might ask to be run under sudo.)

Refer to Quickstart for next steps.

Nightly Releases

Binary packages of Drake for Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) and Mac are generated nightly and are available to download at:

Older packages for specific dates are available by replacing latest with an 8-digit date preceded by 0.0., e.g., 0.0.20240408 for April 8th, 2024.

Users of macOS must download using a command-line tool such as curl instead of using a web browser, to avoid hassles from Gatekeeper checks for malicious software. See the “Stable Releases” section above for a sample command line.

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

The installation instructions are identical to stable releases as shown above.

As with stable releases, users of macOS must download using a command-line tool such as curl instead of using a web browser, to avoid hassles from Gatekeeper checks for malicious software.