Installation
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GnuCash runs under Windows, MacOS, and many flavors of Linux/Unix. Installation is generally quite easy; instructions specific to different supported operating systems are given below.
If you need to use a version of GnuCash more up to date than the version available from your operating system or distribution's repositories and software sources, you can build GnuCash from source code. Links to instructions for building from the sources are provided on the appropriate OS/distribution installation pages. If specific instructions are not yet available for your system, you may consider adapting available instructions from a similar OS/distribution.
Contents
Unix Derivates
Linux
Linux users usually use their distribution's software management to install GnuCash and its dependencies.
You can check distributions for available versions of GnuCash by
- repology.org or
- distrowatch.com
- the recent,
- an almost recent or also
- older GnuCash version.
- Tip
- Depending on their update policy there can be a separate repository Backports or similar with a more recent version.
- Specific distribution families
- Debian
- Ubuntu (and derivatives)
- Gentoo
- Mandriva
- RedHat based: Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, …
- openSuSE
- Slackware
- Distribution agnostic
- recent (both stable and test) versions of GnuCash can now be installed, too:
MacOS
Download the binary package from sourceforge.net or Github. Once you have downloaded the disk image, double click to open it, and then drag the app icon into your Applications folder (or anywhere else on your system that you choose). If you plan to use online features, drag the "Install Online Quotes" icon as well. Once you have copied them to your system, you can close the disk image. To run Gnucash, double click the icon on your system.
- For compiling GnuCash on MacOS, see MacOS Installation and specific MacOS/Quartz tips
Others
Other Operating Systems
Windows
Download the binary installer package from sourceforge.net or Github. There are also recent nightly builds of stable and—after creation—future are on code.gnucash.org. See Microsoft Windows for more information.
Upgrading
When upgrading GnuCash, there is no need to uninstall previous versions. It is a good practice to make a backup of your data and settings prior to any upgrade in case anything goes wrong with the upgrade.
Minor upgrades (within, for example, version 5.xx below 5.9xx) will not include changes to the data file structures, meaning that it is easy to return to the earlier minor version simply by reinstalling the earlier version.
Major upgrades may include feature or structural changes in data storage that make reversion to an earlier version impossible, and returning to the earlier software version requires you also to use an earlier data file--another reason to make a backup before upgrading!
If you are upgrading from a much older version, the recommended method is to:
- Make a backup of your data file.
- Upgrade to the last release in each major version.
- Open the data file in that version and perform a check & repair[1] on the entire file.
Here are the last release of each major version:
- Version 4
- 4.14
- Version 3
- 3.11
- Version 2
- 2.6.21
See also
- Configuration Locations
- ↑
- check & repair
- There are a bunch of routines that we call scrubs that run at the beginning of a session. They
- uncorrupt data
- from a few bugs known to have caused problems, do some
- data-integrity checks
- like
- making sure that transactions balance: and that
- all of the accounts referenced in splits actually exist,
- and make
- data changes for older files
- needed by the current GnuCash version.
- Check and repair runs those scrubs (again) plus a few more.
- ↑
