Installing LCM

A limited set of package managers on certain systems provide prebuilt packages for LCM. This page enumerates those.

System packages

LCM is also available on some system package managers, although there is not widespread coverage.

Ubuntu (via apt)

To install the main LCM package run:

sudo apt install liblcm-dev

To install Java-based components, run:

sudo apt install liblcm-java

Some versions of Ubuntu also have an LCM Python package available via apt. Please check your version of Ubuntu before running any of the below commands:

# On 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) only
sudo apt install python-liblcm
# On 24.04 (Noble Numbat) only
sudo apt install python3-lcm

macOS (via homebrew)

To install the LCM package run:

brew install lcm

Arch Linux (AUR)

LCM is available in the lcm package.

For more information on how to install a package using AUR, see the AUR docs.

Note: in order to get Java-based components (like lcm-logplayer-gui) you’ll need to install java-environment before running makepkg.

NixOS

LCM is available in the lcm package. Please see the NixOS package index for more information.

Python packages (via pip)

LCM can be installed via the Python package manager (pip) on many systems. To do so, run:

pip3 install lcm

This package contains:

The LCM Python module
LCM executables (for example, lcm-logplayer)
- Note: Java-based executables (like lcm-logplayer-gui) are not included for musl-based linux distributions
Development files (headers and libraries)

Note: this package has a hard runtime dependency on GLib 2.0. If you have not already, please install this dependency before using the Python package.