An alternative way to install Juno

Julia overview

Julia is a high-performance and dynamic programming language that was developed in 2012 by Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral B. Shah. It is open-source and fast-emerging. It was specifically designed to implement basic mathematics quickly and was originally built for data science, particularly machine learning. As other languages have IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) for writing, running, and building projects, there are various IDEs for Julia. Some of the well-known are Juno, Weave, Spyder, and LightHouse. Also, Visual Studio Code has an extension for the language. The most used IDE is Juno. Juno is an IDE built for Julia, which has all the necessary features used for development in the language. To install Juno, there are two requirements;

1. Julia
2. Atom

This is because Juno is built on Atom. The minimum requirement needed to install Juno the ideal way is to have at least version 1.0 of Julia and the latest version of Atom installed. In Atom, the package uber-juno is downloaded and installed. In some cases, some dependencies cause issues as the package are still in development. In this answer, we'll share one of the best alternatives to install Juno on Atom. This method can be used when the previous method of installation has issues. The tools/packages needed for this mode of installation are Nodejs, Python 2.7, npm, apm, and apx.

Install Julia

When we install Julia for the first time, the Error: Installing “julia-client@0.8.10” failed error may come up. Julia-client is the core package of Juno, which, if not installed, will not allow Juno to run on Atom.

The other method to install julia-client is to first install Nodejs, then open Powershell as administrator and run the following commands:

This would take a while (around 15 minutes). This would install some Microsoft Visual Studio Tools and Python 2.7.

We'll also learn to remove Python 2.7 from the path after installing this in case another version of Python is installed on the system. Then we should run the second command:

This will install julia-client on our system.

Reinstall uber-juno

After julia-client has been installed, uninstall uber-juno then install it again. This should install Juno on Atom. Then to verify if it is working perfectly on Atom, start a session and try running the REPL. The following issue may come up:

To add Julia to the path, the C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia\Julia-1.4.1\bin path should be placed in the Julia Path option.

Install Dependencies

After performing these steps, Juno might not still run. This is because another build/dependency is missing. The name of this dependency is ink. To install ink, the following command is used:

The apx is an alternative package manager for Atom. Then run the following command again:

After this, both ink and julia-client will be installed.

Uninstall and re-install uber-juno

Finally, uninstall and reinstall uber-juno. Then automatically, Juno will start running, and the following error can appear:

This can be fixed in two ways:

1. Restart Atom
2. Uninstall julia-client and ink then reinstall it again.

First, try to restart an atom. If that doesn’t work, then we can follow the installation guide:

Now, Juno has been successfully installed on Atom, and we can start the REPL and run any .jl file.

If you have any version of Python installed and want to remove Python 2.7 from the path, follow the below steps:

• Open Control Panel\Programs\Uninstall a Program, click Python 2.7.5 (64-bit), and click the “Change” option.
• We are redirected to the Python Application Wizard and then click “Remove Python 2.7.5 (64-bit).”

This would remove Python 2.7 from the path but not uninstall it. Now your other version of Python will be on the path again.