Installing Gephi

Installing the software

Windows

  1. After the download completes, run the installer and follow the steps.

Mac OS X

  1. After the download completes, click on the downloaded .dmg file.
  2. Drag the gephi application in your Application folder.

Linux

  1. After the download completes, unzip and untar the file in a directory.
  2. Run it by executing ./bin/gephi script file.

Troubleshooting

Gephi doesn't start on older Mac OS versions

If you're running an older version of Mac OS (older than MacOS Mojave 10.14.4), you may need to install this Apple extension to run Gephi.

Use your own Java VM

By default, Gephi embeds the Java JRE 11 (x64) from Adoptium. Follow the instructions below if you would like to use your own JVM instead. We discourage using newer versions of the JRE (beyond 11) at the moment due to OpenGL compatibility issues.

Linux

You may provide the path to the jdk with ./bin/gephi --jdkhome $JAVA_HOME

JVM Creation failed

This error message is due to memory settings, see following section.

Memory

Memory available to Gephi is determined by Java automatically. If you would like to control the maximum memory Gephi can use you can do that by tweaking Gephi’s startup settings. Note that if more memory than what the system is equipped with is set, Java will not be able to start and return “JVM Creation failed” message.

To modify memory settings, you need to edit the gephi.conf settings file. Modify the default_options line and add a -J-Xmx2048m option to set the maximum heap space. For example, here it was set to 2G (2048m). If you have Gephi open, you must close and reopen Gephi before new options take effect.

How to edit gephi.conf:

  • On Windows, go to the Gephi folder in Start menu and click on Startup Settings. Edit this file with Notepad or WordPad. Alternatively, go in C:\Program Files (x86)\Gephi 0.9.3\etc\gephi.conf and edit file manually.
  • On Mac OS X, right-click on Gephi application icon and select Show Package Contents to open a new Finder window displaying a Contents folder. Open the Contents folder, and then open the Resources/gephi/etc folder, in which the gephi.conf file resides. Use TextEdit to edit the file.
  • On Linux, go into your application directory and then into the etc folder. Edit the file with a text editor.

When multiple JRE or JDK are installed on the same machine, you can specify to Gephi to use a particular path. Edit gephi.conf as  described in the upper section, uncomment the jdkhome line and set the JRE or JDK path.

User files

Locate and delete gephi user directory to clean your installation.

  • On Windows 2K/XP, user directory is located in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\.gephi
  • On Windows Vista/Seven/8/10, user directory is located in C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\gephi\0.9
  • On Mac OS X, user directory is located in /Users/username/Library/Application Support/gephi/0.9/config
  • On Linux, user directory is located in /home/username/.gephi