sigil BuildingFromSource

General notes

You will need CMake 2.8.0 or later on all platforms. You can download it here. CMake is a cross-platform system for build automation. It can generate Visual Studio project files on Windows, Xcode project files on Mac OS X and Makefiles on Unix systems. After installing CMake, you can see a list of generators provided on your system by typing cmake in your terminal and pressing enter. The supported generators should be listed near the bottom of the printout.

Qt 4.7.x is also required on all platforms. It can be downloaded here (choose the LGPL version).

Mac users should grab the Qt SDK. Windows users can also download the SDK which comes with MinGW and the Qt Creator IDE. If you want to use the Visual Studio compiler, you should download the precompiled Qt libraries for Visual Studio 2008 from Nokia's website. Linux users should get it from their distribution's package manager (more information in the Linux section).

On some platforms a makeinstaller target is provided which will build a binary installer. For that to work, you need to have InstallJammer installed and on the system PATH. You can get InstallJammer here. You need to have the Qt libraries on the system PATH as well.

Compiling on Windows

It is assumed you want to generate Visual Studio project files. You can do this by creating a new folder outside of the source distribution.

Now navigate to that folder with a terminal like cmd.exe or PowerShell. Then type in and run the following:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 10" /path/to/extracted/folder

This should create SLN and vcproj files for Visual Studio in that directory. You can also generate project files for some other VS version. You can get a list of all supported generators by typing in and running cmake.

The default build procedure will build "Sigil.exe"; if you want to package that with the required DLL's into an installer, build the makeinstaller project.

There is also an add-in for VS on Qt's website. It will make it easier to develop Qt applications like Sigil, but is not strictly necessary.

NOTE: If you generate solution files for VS 2010 with CMake version <= 2.8.1, those builds will fail. This is caused by a bug in CMake. This bug has been fixed and CMake 2.8.2 and above don't have this problem.

Compiling on Mac

It is assumed you want to generate Xcode project files. You can do this by creating a new folder outside of the source distribution.

Now navigate to that folder with the Terminal. Then type in and run the following:

cmake -G Xcode /path/to/extracted/folder

This should create Xcode project files in that directory. The default build procedure will build "Sigil.app"; if you want to package that into a DMG file, invoke the makedmg build target.

Compiling on Linux

Aside from the core Qt libraries, you will also need to install libqt4-xml, libqt4-svg, libqt4-webkit and libqt4-dev (and their various dependencies) which are not included by default in Qt.

This should be as simple as typing in the following command into your terminal (on Debian-like systems):

sudo apt-get install libqt4-gui libqt4-svg libqt4-webkit libqt4-xml libqt4-dev

It is assumed you want to generate Makefiles. You can do this by creating a new folder outside of the source distribution.

Now navigate to that folder with a terminal. Then type in and run the following:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release /path/to/extracted/folder
 make
 sudo make install

That builds and installs Sigil on Linux. By default, Sigil is installed in ${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/bin, with CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX defaulting to usr/local.

You can change the install location by running cmake like this:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/new/install/prefix -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release /path/to/extracted/folder

Aside from using the install target, you can also build a binary installer by invoking the makeinstaller build target.

Building from source in the repository is recommended, since code in the repository should always be stable. If it's not, that's a bug report.

Compiling Qt

Compiling Qt directly should not be necessary. Nevertheless, if you wish to compile Qt, you should configure it before compiling like this:

configure -opensource -qt-zlib -qt-gif -qt-libpng -qt-libmng -qt-libtiff -qt-libjpeg

These are the options used to configure the Qt libraries that are provided with Sigil on Windows.

Building Qt takes many hours. You can save yourself a lot of time by passing -nomake tools -nomake examples -nomake demos -nomake docs -nomake translations to configure as well. For Visual Studio builds, passing -ltcg is also strongly recommended.