Installing from ZIP

Installing GanttProject from platform-independent ZIP archive

TL;DR: unzip ganttproject-3.3.3312.zip && cd ganttproject-3.3.3312 && ./ganttproject

Normally you install GanttProject using platform-specific packages, such as an executable installer on Windows or deb package on Linux. However, sometimes you may want to use a platform-independent ZIP archive.

Why

There are a few cases when you may want to install GanttProject from the ZIP archive:

• anti-virus software reports viruses in the native installer
• there is no installer or other native package for your operating system (e.g. you are on OpenSolaris)
• launcher from the native installer doesn't work (e.g. nothing happens when you click GanttProject icon in your Programs menu on Windows)
• you want to do some other debugging stuff, e.g. see messages printed to the console
• you want to keep a few different versions of GanttProject
• you want to modify GanttProject startup parameters, e.g. use some other JRE or give more memory to the Java VM

How

In the most simple case installing is very easy: unzip ganttproject-3.3.3312.zip file to any directory on your disk drive, and run a launcher script from the installation directory. The script you need to run is ganttproject.bat on Windows, ganttproject.command on macOS and ganttproject.sh on Linux/UNIX systems. If your environment meets the prerequisites, it is very likely that you will see GanttProject starting and running.

What if it doesn't work

Prerequisites

Hard prerequisite: you need to have Java Runtime (aka JRE). We recommend using BellSoft Liberica Full JRE 17, or Azul Zulu JRE FX 17 although more recent versions, such as Java 21, shall also work fine. Most probably, GanttProject will not work with Java Runtimes from other vendors, because it needs platform-dependent JavaFX libraries.

Soft prerequisite: it is nice if you can run java executable from the console. On Windows console application is called Command line prompt, on MacOSX it is called Terminal. Linux guys hopefully know how to open a console (okay, it is called Terminal on GNOME desktops or Konsole in KDE). Open a terminal window, type java -version, and hit Enter. If you see something like this (the version number may be different)

$ java -version
openjdk version "17.0.8" 2023-07-18 LTS
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 17.0.8+7-LTS)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 17.0.8+7-LTS, mixed mode, sharing)

then you're probably OK (it depends if JavaFX modules are available or not). If you see a message which says something similar to "java not found", bad luck. You may try reinstalling Java, but if for some reason you can't or don't want to do it, please read the next section.

Setting JAVA_HOME environment variable

You need to do it if you're absolutely sure that JRE is installed, but you can't run java from console or if you want to use some other non-default JRE. The following text assumes that your system is Windows and GanttProject is installed in C:\GanttProject

Your task it to point a launcher script to the location of the JRE on your system. First, find that location :) If you have absolutely no idea how to do it, search for java.exe file. JRE is usually installed in a directory with the following structure:

<lots of files>
bin
  |
  +-- <lots of files>
  +-- java.exe
lib   
  |
  +-- <lots of files>

This directory is your Java home. Copy the full path to that directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\Java\jre6), open C:\GanttProject\ganttproject.bat in your favorite text editor and add the following at the first line:

SET "JAVA_HOME=C:\Path\To\Your\jre"

replacing C:\Path\To\Your\jre with the actual location of your Java Runtime.