Creating an executable that runs on the computer on which Prolog is installed is rather simple. Below, we create myexe from file.pl and make it execute hello/0. The contents of hello.pl is given below

% swipl -o myexe -g hello -c hello.pl
% ./myexe
Hello world!

hello.pl

hello :-
    format('Hello world!~n'),
    halt.

Stand-alone executables

The above creates a shell-script that calls the locally installed swipl executable. Using the option --stand_alone=true, the executable becomes a copy of swipl with the state attached to it. If the SWI-Prolog kernel is statically linked (default on Linux/i386) and the state does not use external packages that provide shared objects, you are done. Otherwise, you must make the shared objects available and findable to make the program usable on another computer.

On linux, you find the dependent shared objects using ldd, e.g., the example below says that (among many system libraries), myexe requires libswipl.so.5.11.15.

% ldd myexe
...
libswipl.so.5.11.15 => /home/jan/lib/swipl/lib/x86_64-linux/libswipl.so.5.11.15
...

libswipl.so.5.11.15 must be bundled with your application and myexe must be told where to find this file. This is typically resolved either by wrapping myexe in a shell-script that sets the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH or using chrpath(1) to change the location where myexe looks for.

Foreign packages

Many of the packages include a .so file that extends Prolog. If your program depends on that, you need to distribute the .so files used with your application. You can find the objects used with current_foreign_library/2. By default, the objects are searched for with the alias foreign (see file_search_path/2 and absolute_file_name/3). You can alter this path using the option -p foreign=/path/to/dir