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# 2.5. Download source and documentation as a tarball

You can download a current LAMMPS tarball from the download page of the LAMMPS website or from GitHub (see below).

You have two choices of tarballs, either the most recent stable release or the most recent feature release. Stable releases occur a few times per year, and undergo more testing before release. Also, between stable releases bug fixes from the feature releases are back-ported and the tarball occasionally updated. Feature releases occur every 4 to 8 weeks. The new contents in all feature releases are listed on the bug and feature page of the LAMMPS homepage.

Tarballs of older LAMMPS versions can also be downloaded from this page.

Tarballs downloaded from the LAMMPS homepage include the pre-translated LAMMPS documentation (HTML and PDF files) corresponding to that version.

Once you have a tarball, uncompress and untar it with the following command:

    tar -xzvf lammps*.tar.gz

This will create a LAMMPS directory with the version date in its name, e.g. `lammps-28Mar23`.

You can also download a compressed tar or zip archives from the “Assets” sections of the LAMMPS GitHub releases site. The file name will be lammps-<version>.zip which can be unzipped with the following command, to create a lammps-<version> directory:

    unzip lammps*.zip

This version corresponds to the selected LAMMPS feature or stable release (as indicated by the matching git tag) and will only contain the source code and no pre-built documentation.