Julia: How to Upgrade to A New Release

Hongtao Hao / 2021-07-04


I am using macOS.

First, download the new Julia release you are looking for from the Official Downloads . Take Julia v1.6.1 for example. When downloading is done, drag the julia icon to Applications. You’ll see that the old Julia was replaced by the new one. That said, when you open Applications from Finder, or simply run the following snippet from your Terminal

open -a Finder ../../Applications

You’ll see that the old version(s) is still there.

At this time, when you type julia --version in Terminal, what will be shown is the old version, not the updated one you just downloaded.

To update the Julia version in Terminal, you need to create a symlink to the updated version. The following snippet should run from your shell, e.g., the Terminal app on MacOS:

rm -f /usr/local/bin/julia
ln -s /Applications/Julia-1.6.app/Contents/Resources/julia/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia

The above snippet is taken from Julia’s Office Documentation . Refer to that link for updated codes if the new version you downloaded is not v1.6.1.

Run julia --version from your Terminal, you will see the updated version.

You can check by running this snippet from your Terminal as well:

julia # Initiate the Julia prompt
versioninfo()

At this time, all the packages in your old Julia version are not in the updated version.

To “transfer” packages, run the following codes in your Terminal (Suppose you are upgrading from v1.5 to v1.6):

cd ~/.julia/environments/
mkdir v1.6
cp v1.5/Project.toml v1.6/
cp v1.5/Manifest.toml v1.6/

The above snippet came from Antonello’s answer on Stack Overflow.

At this point, if you previously have IJulia installed, when you open the Jupyter Notebook, you can only see the old version.

To add the new Julia version in Jupyter Notebook, run the following in your Terminal:

Julia # Initiate the Julia prompt
import Pkg
# Pkg.add("IJulia") if you haven't installed IJulia yet; 
# or Pkg.update("IJulia") if you want an update
Pkg.build("IJulia")

You will be able to see the updated version in your Jupyter Notebook.

I learned this snippet from this thread on Julia’s forum .

One last question you might have is how to remove old Julia versions from Jupyter Notebook. Louise Davies’s answer comes in handy here. Run jupyter kernelspec list in your Terminal, and run something like jupyter kernelspec uninstall julia-1.5 to uninstall the old version(s).

Last modified on 2021-10-05