Setting up MMT

To obtain and set up MMT, perform the following steps:

1) Install Java (if you haven’t already)

MMT targets Java 8 (both OpenJDK and OracleJDK are supported), and preliminary support for Java 9 exists. Java 11 works as well. Java 7 is no longer officially supported.

2) Install jEdit (if you haven’t already)

jEdit is a Java-based text editor. MMT includes a jEdit plugin, which turns jEdit into an IDE for MMT. This step is optional but highly recommended if you want to write or view MMT files. If you just want to sample MMT, you should definitely do it with jEdit.

Concretely:

  • Download and install jEdit.
  • Run jEdit once and close it again. (That allows MMT to automatically find the jEdit installation and configure it to work with MMT.)

3) Install Git

MMT uses git internally, so make sure it is installed.

4) Install MMT

There are two options for this step:

a) Casual Users: Download the Binary Distribution

The file mmt.jar provides a self-contained executable file.

mmt.jar is released roughly every 2 months. A list of releases can be found on the GitHub Releases page. The latest one can be downloaded by clicking the top most item on the list.

b) Advanced Users: Clone the Source Distribution and Build MMT Yourself

Clone the MMT repository from GitHub:

git clone git@github.com:UniFormal/MMT.git

Alternatively, if you do not have ssh keys set up, use

git clone https://github.com/UniFormal/MMT.git`

A detailed explanation of the contents of the repository is available here.

MMT is currently built for Scala 2.12.3 (incuded in the repository) and building is done with sbt (the Scala build tool). If you do not have sbt, you can get it here.

To build, execute

cd MMT/src
sbt mmt/deploy

(Detailed instructions for building can be found here).

This creates many files, in particular the file mmt.jar in the folder ../deploy/.

Change to that directory:

cd ../deploy/

Besides mmt.jar, this directory contains executable scripts (for Windows and Unix) to for running MMT.

5) Set Up MMT

In the previous, you obtained the file mmt.jar (by downloading or building).

To start setup open a shell and run java -jar mmt.jar.
On Windows, this assumes that git can be called from within sh, which means sh has to be in your PATH; depending on how you installed git, this may already be the case. If it is not in your PATH, you can also directly issue the java -jar mmt.jar command from within Git Bash from an existing Git for Windows installation.

This triggers the setup dialog which does the following:

  1. asks for a directory into which MMT should be installed
  2. checks out some example content repositories into that directory (This requires git and internet access.),
  3. determines the location of your jEdit settings directory and - if it exists - adds the MMT plugin to jEdit.

Further instructions for setting up jEdit are available here.

6) Run MMT

If you want to use MMT via jEdit, you do not have to run MMT itself. It will act as a plugin within jEdit: just start jEdit and open .mmt files.

Developers or advanced users may want to run MMT directly for various other applications. The canonical way for this is to run java -jar mmt.jar. (This responds with a simple setup dialog if MMT not installed, and drops to a shell otherwise.) But depending on your OS and configuration, double-clicking or executing mmt.jar may also work.

Additional instructions for running MMT are available here.

Later: Update MMT

This step is not part of the initial setup. It is only needed later when updating your MMT installation to the latest release.

To update MMT, replace the file mmt.jar, i.e.,

  • binary distribution: download the new file and save it over deploy/mmt.jar
  • source distribution: update your working copy and rebuild.

To rerun setup, execute

java -jar mmt.jar :setup

However, rerunning setup is usually not necessary.