TerraGearThere is nothing to download here in the usual sense. TerraGear is distributed as source: no installer, no binary package; you clone the repository and build the tools. Installing TerraGear covers the build, which takes about twenty seconds on ten cores, assuming its dependencies are already installed.
git clone https://gitlab.com/flightgear/terragear.gitThat gives you next, which is the branch under active
development.
Which branch
The repository has nine branches and they are not equally alive. Checked 23 August 2026:
| Branch | Last commit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
next | 2026-08-09 | Default on clone. Active. |
scenery/ws2.0 | 2023-04-23 | What the wiki recommends. |
master | 2020-11-02 | Not the development branch. |
ws_20 | 2018-06-16 | Superseded. |
release/2.0.0 | 2013-01-07 | Historical. |
The FlightGear wiki directs users to scenery/ws2.0 for stable
work. That branch has not moved since April 2023. next is where the
last three years of work went and is what produced the
measured build described on this site.
next needs a one-line fix before it compiles. A
commit in June 2026 removed an #include that is still used, and the
branch has not built since. It is one line, and
Common errors and fixes gives it. Mentioned
here because it is the first thing you will hit after cloning, and because it is
a live defect rather than a property of the design.
Is the project maintained?
Yes, though the first evidence you meet suggests otherwise. The repository has 1,418 commits; 25 of them landed in 2026 before the end of August, 19 in 2025 and 46 in 2023. One person, Scott Giese, has made roughly 90 of the commits of the last three years.
The GitHub mirror
Every place the code exists, and what became of the mirrors the original site listed, is on Mirrors.
A copy sits at github.com/FlightGear/terragear, described in its own repository blurb as a mirror. Its last push was 18 April 2022, and it is not marked archived.
It is also, for most searches, the first result, which makes a four-year-old last-commit date the first fact a newcomer learns about TerraGear. It reads as a dead project. The project is not dead; the mirror is stale. Clone from GitLab.
Releases
Nothing current. The repository carries two tags, genapts and
newconstr, neither of which is a version, and the
version file in the tree reads 2024.2.0 with nothing
tagged to match it.
There were releases once. The project’s own site announced five:
| Version | Released |
|---|---|
| 0.0.3 | 6 April 2000 |
| 0.0.4 | 19 December 2000 |
| 0.0.5 | 25 February 2003 |
| 0.9.5 | 30 July 2004 |
| 0.9.8 | January 2005 |
0.9.8 needed plib 1.8.3 or newer and SimGear 0.3.8 exactly; the same version-pinning problem the install page describes today, twenty years apart. Nothing has been released since.
There is one set of published binaries, and it is easy to miss: official
container images on Docker Hub as
flightgear/terragear,
tagged latest and ws20, 146 MB each.
latest was last pushed
on 15 July 2019 and ws20 on 26 June 2019; checked 23 August 2026,
1,642 pulls between them. They predate seven years of commits, including every
change on next. They are the fastest way to see the toolchain run,
and they are not the toolchain as it stands today. If you want current tools,
build from source; the whole build takes about a minute of compiling.
<chrono> regression above illustrates. If tags start being
published, this page is where they belong.
What else you need
The tools are half of it. A build also needs source data: elevation, airports and land cover, each collected separately. See Where to get terrain data for locations that were checked this month: several of those in the project’s own documentation have been dead for years, and one of them returns a 404 rather than anything that looks like an error you would notice.