4 Xapian's build system is built using GNU autoconf, automake, and libtool.
5 If you've installed other Open Source projects from source, you should
6 find yourself in familiar territory. Building and installing involves
7 the following 3 simple steps:
9 1) Run "./configure", possibly with some extra arguments (see below)
10 2) Run "make" to build Xapian
11 3) Run "make install" to install Xapian
16 You'll need to have zlib installed (http://www.zlib.net/) before you can build
17 Xapian. The zlib library is very widely used, so you'll probably have it
18 installed already if you're using Linux, FreeBSD, or similar, but you may need
19 to install a "zlib development" package to get the zlib library headers.
21 We recommend using zlib 1.2.x as it apparently fixes a memory leak in
22 deflateInit2 (which Xapian uses) and decompression is supposed to be about 20%
23 faster than with 1.1.x, but it's pretty unlikely you'll have an older version
26 Xapian also requires a way to generate UUIDs. On FreeBSD, NetBSD, and
27 Microsoft Windows, Xapian makes use of built-in UUID APIs. On Linux and
28 Android, Xapian 1.4.2 and higher can read UUIDs from a special file under
29 /proc. Otherwise you need to install libuuid which you can find in
30 util-linux-ng (http://userweb.kernel.org/~kzak/util-linux-ng/). On Debian and
31 Ubuntu, the package to install is uuid-dev, while on Fedora, it is
32 libuuid-devel (on older Fedora versions you instead need e2fsprogs-devel).
37 We aim to support compilation with any C++ compiler which support ISO C++11, or
38 a reasonable approximation to it.
43 If you're using GCC, we currently recommend GCC 4.8 or newer (this is the
44 oldest version we regularly test with).
46 The current hard minimum requirement is also GCC 4.8 (due to requiring good
47 support for C++11, for example non-static data member initializers aren't
48 supported by earlier versions).
50 If you really still need to use an older version of GCC, Xapian 1.4.x aims
51 to support GCC 4.7, while Xapian 1.2.x doesn't require C++11 support and should
52 build with older versions - probably as far back as GCC 3.1.
57 If you're using MS Visual C++, you'll need at least MSVS 2015 for C++11
60 As of Xapian 1.4.6 building using MSVC is supported by the autotools build
61 system. You need to install a set of Unix-like tools first - we recommended
62 MSYS2: https://www.msys2.org/
64 Then from a bash shell run configure like so::
66 ./configure CC="cl -nologo" CXX="$PWD/compile cl -nologo" CXXFLAGS=-EHsc AR=lib
68 You'll need to have the zlib library available. You can also specify
69 ``CPPFLAGS=-I/path/to/zlib LDFLAGS=-L/path/to/zlib`` to tell MSVC where to
70 find the zlib headers and library.
72 We support 64-bit compilation with MSVS 2017. With MSVS 2015 a 64-bit build
73 fails to work - we haven't investigated why.
78 When using HP's aCC, Xapian must be compiled with +std=c++11, which
79 xapian-core's configure automatically detects and passes. You don't have to
80 pass this option when building code which uses Xapian, but you can.
85 When using GCC on platforms which support multiple architecture, the simplest
86 way to select a non-default architecture is to pass a CXX setting to configure
87 which includes the appropriate -m option - e.g. to build for x86 on x86-64
88 you would configure with:
90 ./configure CXX='g++ -m32'
92 Building in a separate directory
93 ================================
95 If you wish to perform your build in a separate directory from the source,
96 create and change to the build directory, and run the configure script (in
97 the source directory) from the build directory, like so:
103 Options to give to configure
104 ============================
107 You should use this to build a version of Xapian with many internal
108 consistency checks. This will run more slowly, but is useful if you
109 suspect a bug in Xapian.
111 --enable-backend-glass
112 --enable-backend-inmemory
113 --enable-backend-remote
114 These options enable (or disable if --disable-backend-XXX is specified)
115 the compiling of each backend (database access methods). By default,
116 all backends for which the appropriate libraries and OS support are
117 available will be enabled. Note: Currently disabling the remote
118 backend also disables replication (because the network code is shared).
123 When compiling with GCC, by default Xapian will be built with _FORTIFY_SOURCE
124 set to 2. This enables some compile time and runtime checking of values passed
125 to library functions when building with GCC >= 4.1 and glibc >= 2.34 (some
126 Linux distros may have backported support to older GCC and/or glibc). If you
127 wish to disable this for any reason, you can just configure like so:
129 ./configure CPPFLAGS=-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=0
131 Or you can set the "fortification level" to 1 instead of 2:
133 ./configure CPPFLAGS=-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=1
135 If you're disabling it because it causes problems, please also report this to
136 us (via the bug tracker or mailing lists).
141 If -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions is supported (for example it is by GCC with modern
142 ld) then it will be automatically used when linking the library. This causes
143 all references from inside the library to symbols inside the library to be
144 resolved when the library is created, rather than when the shared library is
145 loaded, which decreases the time taken to load the library, reduces its size,
146 and is also likely to make the code run a little faster.
148 Should you wish to disable this for some reason, you can configure like so
149 which disables the probe for -Bsymbolic-functions so it won't ever be used:
151 ./configure xo_cv_symbolic_functions=no
153 If you're disabling it because it causes problems, please also report this to
154 us (via the bug tracker or mailing lists).
159 When compiling with GCC >= 4.0 for platforms which support symbol visibility,
160 we automatically pass -fvisibility=hidden to g++ when building the library, and
161 mark classes, methods, and functions which need exporting with attributes to
164 Should you wish to disable this for some reason, you can configure like so:
166 ./configure --disable-visibility
168 If you're disabling it because it causes problems, please also report this to
169 us (via the bug tracker or mailing lists).
174 There are additional scripts and configure options to help people doing
175 development work on Xapian itself, and people who are building from git.
176 Read HACKING to find out about them.