Downloading and installing Rakudo Star

There are a few ways of installing Rakudo Star on your computer. You can either download the source code and compile it or download an installer for your platform. Rakudo Star is available for all major platforms, namely, Windows (both 32- and 64-bit versions), Mac OS X, and Linux.

The main download page of Rakudo Star is http://perl6.org/downloads. On that page, you will find links to the latest versions of the Rakudo Star distributions for different platforms and instructions on how to install them.

On Windows, the process is extremely simple. Just download the most recent version of the MSI installer, run it, and follow the instructions.

On Mac OS X, you either download a .dmg installer, or use the brew manager, as shown here:

$ brew install rakudo-star

On Linux, you have to install Rakudo Star from the source files.

After you have installed Rakudo Star, you will find the perl6 executable file in its bin directory. Make sure to add the path to that directory to your system-wide PATH variable so that you can type perl6 from any location.

In the rest of this book, we will assume that Rakudo Star is installed, and we will use the perl6 executable to run programs.