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 in the release notes of the LAMMPS GitHub page.

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.

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You can also download the same compressed tar archives from the “Assets” sections of the LAMMPS GitHub releases site.

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You can check that a downloaded file is complete and has not been modified by comparing its SHA-256 checksum with the published checksum. For files from the LAMMPS download server, download the file SHA256SUMS from the same web page (for example from this page) into the folder with the downloaded tarball and type:

sha256sum --ignore-missing -c SHA256SUMS

This prints the name of each downloaded file that is in the list followed by either “OK” or “FAILED”. On macOS, please use shasum -a 256 instead of sha256sum.

LAMMPS releases on GitHub that were published after the stable release of 30 September 2026 also contain a file SHA256SUMS and in addition a file SHA256SUMS.asc with a digital signature for it. With this signature you can confirm that the list of checksums was created by the LAMMPS developer who published the release:

curl -sL https://github.com/akohlmey.gpg | gpg --import
gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.asc SHA256SUMS

The first command is needed only once. It imports the public key of Axel Kohlmeyer, who currently signs the LAMMPS releases. The second command must report a “Good signature” and the following “Primary key fingerprint”:

EEA1 0376 4C6C 633E DC8A  C428 D9B4 4E93 BF0C 375A

The gpg command will also print a warning that the key is “not certified with a trusted signature”. This is expected, since it only means that you have not told gpg that you trust this key, and it is the reason for comparing the fingerprint.

Files from releases on GitHub can alternatively be checked with the GitHub command-line program, for example:

gh release verify-asset --repo lammps/lammps stable_30Sep2026 lammps-src-30Sep2026.tar.gz