Roswell is a command line tool used to install and manage Common Lisp implementations. It’s similar to Ruby’s rvm and Python’s pyenv.

There are some binaries available, but none for CentOS. The following will get Roswell up and running on a fresh CentOS 7.2 installation:

Setting up CentOS

Run the following as root to install dependencies required for building Roswell:

yum install git automake gcc gcc-c++ make openssl-devel curl-devel bzip2

Fetching and installing Roswell

These can be run as any user:

git clone -b release https://github.com/roswell/roswell.git
cd roswell
sh bootstrap
./configure
make

And as root

make install

And finally (as the original user)…

ros setup

Roswell will now be installed and available globally.

Installing and running a Lisp

To install a Lisp binary, such as SBCL, run:

ros install sbcl-bin

SBCL can then be started using ros run.