Choose your OS:

Ubuntu packages


Ubuntu comes with darktable packages. You can install them with

sudo apt-get install darktable

If you need a newer version than what is included in your distribution, check out the third party packages section.

Fedora packages


Fedora ships with darktable. A simple command should be enough.

# dnf install darktable

If you need a newer version than what is included in your distribution, check out the third party packages section.

openSUSE packages


openSUSE ships with darktable. A simple zypper install darktable should be enough.

If you need a newer version than what is included in your distribution, check out the third party packages section.

Arch Linux


$ pacman -S darktable

• thx to chressie for this, arch is non-ancient :)

Funtoo/Gentoo Linux


darktable is in portage!

# emerge darktable
$ darktable

RHEL / Scientific Linux / Centos


# yum install epel-release
# yum install darktable

Debian


(Of course) there is a darktable package in the Debian repositories.

darktable can be installed by running

sudo apt-get install darktable

If you need a newer version than what is included in your distribution, check out the third party packages section.

Solaris


The darktable Solaris packages are provided and maintained by James. You can find his website here with all the packages provided: https://www.jmcpdotcom.com/blog/category/darktable/.

He has both the darktable packages and a dependency package in case this is the first time you are installing darktable on your system.

FreeBSD


darktable is available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection. It can be installed, pre-compiled, from the standard package repository.

To install darktable on your system, run

# pkg install graphics/darktable

Microsoft Windows


• Read the Windows version specific section in the FAQ first.
• Download the latest Windows installer for darktable.
• Run it and install darktable.

macOS


• Download the latest DMG disk image for darktable
• Mount the thing
• Pull the darktable icon into applications folder
• Good luck :)

This bundle supports macOS versions starting with 10.7 (Lion) running on 64 bit Intel architecture.

What to do with dialog saying “darktable” can’t be opened because it was not downloaded from the Mac App Store:

• Locate darktable in Applications folder (or wherever you installed it) using Finder
• Do “Open” via context menu
• You will be presented with similar-looking dialog, but this time there will be second button allowing you to run the application
• After that you will be able to start darktable without this trick (well, until you update it, then you will have to do above steps again)

or you can prevent this from happening by running xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads/darktable*.dmg command before mounting the image (or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/darktable.app after installing).

macOS MacPorts

darktable can be installed through MacPorts:

sudo port install darktable +quartz

macOS Homebrew

darktable can be installed through Homebrew:

brew cask install darktable

third party packages and PPAs

OBS

The OBS allows packagers to provide packages for multiple distributions.

Right now the darktable packages listed below are built for the following Linux distributions:

Right now this means for the stable package:

• Debian 9, 10, Next aka Testing
• Fedora 29, 30, 31, Rawhide
• openSUSE 15.0, 15.1, Tumbleweed
• Ubuntu 18.04, 19.04, 19.10, 20.04 (only latest release, not snapshot from stable release branch)

For master we build for the following distributions because of missing required packages in older distributions:

• Debian 9, 10, Next aka Testing
• Fedora 29, 30, 31, Rawhide
• openSUSE 15.0, 15.1, Tumbleweed
• Ubuntu 18.04, 19.04, 19.10, 20.04

The available packages are:

• latest release
• snapshots from the stable release branch
• snapshots from the master branch

Backports for Debian

A description on how to enable the backports repository can be found here: https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/

Install from source

Prerequisites

• *nix (tested: Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Funtoo, Gentoo, Fedora, Macintosh OS X with Macports)
• We strongly recommend using a 64bit operating system!
• Required packages: libsqlite3, libjpeg, libpng, libpugixml, rawspeed (supplied), gtk+-3, cairo, lcms2, exiv2, tiff, curl, gphoto2, dbus-glib, fop, openexr, libsoup2.4
• Required: gcc >= 5.0

Current release from source

• Grab the latest source tarball (recent version: darktable 3.2.1) – make sure to use the .tar.xz file and not the auto generated .zip or .tar.gz!

• Install the dependencies. For details see the link below.

• Unpack:

    $ tar xvf darktable-3.2.1.tar.xz && cd darktable-3.2.1
  

• Then either do

    $ ./build.sh
  

• or, manually:

    $ mkdir build && cd build/
    $ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
    $ make -j5
    # make install
    $ darktable
  

  • In order to get darktable displayed along with your other applications you need to set a symlink:

    $ ln -s /opt/darktable/share/applications/darktable.desktop /usr/share/applications/darktable.desktop
    

For a more complete set of instructions for different distributions have a look at our Wiki.

git version

First a word of warning: Using the development version of darktable might be risky in that it can break anytime, kill your edits, eat your kittens or do other nasty things. It is also not guaranteed that XMP sidecars written by a development version will work with a release version. It is also quite certain that any older version of darktable will NOT be able to read the database once a development build updated it to the latest schema. So for your own safety and our sanity, do make backups of your XMP files as well as your library.db and data.db (by default it is in ~/.config/darktable/) BEFORE upgrading to the self compiled git version. That being said, it should be quite safe to actually use it and never go back, so all of this might be no issue for you at all. Just keep in mind that IF you ever want to go back it might be hard.

Be sure to have all the build dependencies installed. You can find a list of them here. If you don’t have it already, install git from your distribution’s repositories. For Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install git

Cloning for the first time

$ cd
$ git clone git://github.com/darktable-org/darktable.git

The cloned files from the git repository are now stored in $HOME/darktable.

Getting rawspeed submodule

$ cd $HOME/darktable
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

Building with build.sh

$ ./build.sh

The files get prepared to be installed in /opt. If you want to install at another place, you have to type:

./build.sh --prefix /path/to/install

After the build process finished you can install darktable:

cd build && sudo make install

Updating existing git-files

$ cd $HOME/darktable
$ git pull

Building manually

$ mkdir $HOME/darktable/build
$ cd $HOME/darktable/build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..

make and install

$ cd $HOME/darktable/build
$ make
$ sudo make install

Starting the program

$ darktable

Let’s rock!