ASDF-INSTALL Tutorial

Overview

This tutorial is intended for people who are new to Common Lisp and for people who are new to ASDF-Install. It describes an easy way to install third-party libraries into a Lisp environment.

This tutorial is a work in progress and a "port" of Edi Weitz's original ASDF-Install tutorial. Please send e-mail to if you have any questions or find anything amiss.

Common Lisp is a wonderful language but it doesn't include built-in support for things many have come to expect (for example: XML, web servers, GUIs, regular expressions and so on). Not to worry, though, most of these needs are ably served by vendors and the teaming world of third party software libraries. Even better, Common Lisp has a tool that helps find libraries, install them, manage dependencies and keep things up to date. That tool is ASDF-Install and that's what this tutorial is all about. There are several paths you can take to get through the tutorial: