# Download source and documentation as a tarball

You can download a current LAMMPS tarball from the [download
page](https://www.lammps.org/download.html)\_ of the [LAMMPS
website](https://www.lammps.org)\_ 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 on the [bug and
feature page](https://www.lammps.org/bug.html)\_ of the LAMMPS homepage.

Tarballs of older LAMMPS versions can also be downloaded from [this
page](https://download.lammps.org/tars/)\_.

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:

``` bash
tar -xzvf lammps*.tar.gz
```

This will create a LAMMPS directory with the version date in its name,
e.g. lammps-28Mar23.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can also download a compressed tar or zip archives from the
\"Assets\" sections of the [LAMMPS GitHub releases
site](https://github.com/lammps/lammps/releases)\_. The file name will
be lammps-\<version\>.zip which can be unzipped with the following
command, to create a lammps-\<version\> directory:

``` bash
unzip lammps*.zip
```

This version corresponds to the selected LAMMPS feature or stable
release (as indicated by the matching git tag) and will only contain the
source code and no pre-built documentation.