Installation

Welcome to the OpenFHE installation instructions! For OS-specific instructions, follow one of the following links below, or proceed with the high-level platform-independent installation instructions below.

Note

Note: By default, the library is built without external dependencies. But the user is also provided options to add

• GMP/NTL

• tcmalloc

• and/or Intel HEXL third-party libraries if desired

Contents:

• Installing OpenFHE on Linux
• Installing OpenFHE on MacOS
• Installing OpenFHE on Windows
• CMAKE in OpenFHE
• Instructions for installing GMP and NTL
• Building User Applications

Build Instructions

We use CMake to build OpenFHE. OpenFHE supports any GNU C++ compiler version 9 or above and clang C++ compiler version 10 or above.

1. Install system prerequisites (if not already installed), including a C++ compiler with OMP support, cmake, make.

2. Clone the OpenFHE repo to your local machine.

3. Create a directory where the binaries will be built. The typical choice is a subfolder “build”. In this case, the commands are:

   mkdir build
   cd build
   cmake ..
   

Note

CMake will check for any system dependencies that are needed for the build process

• If the CMake build does not complete successfully, please review the error CMake shows at the end.

• If the error does not go away (even though you installed the dependency), try running make clean to clear the CMake cache.

4. If you want to use any external libraries, such as NTL/GMP or tcmalloc, install these libraries.

5. Build OpenFHE by running the following command (this will take few minutes; using the -j make command-line flag is suggested to speed up the build) make

• If you want to build only library files or some other subset of OpenFHE, please review the last paragraph of this page.

• After the make completes, you should see the OpenFHE library files in the lib folder, binaries of examples in bin/examples, binaries of benchmarks in bin/benchmark, and binaries for unit tests in the unittest folder.

6. Install OpenFHE to a system directory (if desired or for production purposes)

   make install
   

You would probably need to run sudo make install unless you are specifying some other install location. You can change the install location by running cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/your/path ...

• The header files are placed in the include/openfhe folder of the specified path, and the binaries of the library are copied directly to the lib folder. For example, if no installation path is provided in Ubuntu (and many other Unix-based OSes), the header and library binary files will be placed in /usr/local/include/openfhe and /usr/local/lib, respectively.

Testing and cleaning the build

Run unit tests to make sure all capabilities operate as expected

make testall

Run sample code to test, e.g.,

bin/examples/pke/simple-integers

To remove the files built by make, you can execute

make clean

Supported Operating Systems

OpenFHE CI continually tests our builds on the following operating systems:

• Ubuntu [18.04] [20.04]

• macOS [Mojave]

• Centos 7

• NVIDIA Xavier [Linux for Tegra 4.2.2]

• MinGW (64-bit) on Windows 10

OpenFHE users have reported successful operation on the following systems:

• FreeBSD

• Ubuntu [16.04] [22.04] [23.04]

• macOS [Monterey] [Ventura]

• Arch Linux

Please let us know the results if you have run OpenFHE any additional systems not listed above.