Introduction

Experience with compiling on your chosen platform is assumed. This is not a step by step guide but general information to help fill in gaps.

Current releases of Sigil (as of 0.5) bundle the majority of dependencies. Qt4, CMake and general build tools are required. Sigil's build setup will try to use system installed versions of any bundled dependencies and fall back to the bundled copies. The bundled copies are provided to ease building on Windows and OS X.

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 not use the Qt SDK. Instead use the Qt library package instead. Windows users can 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.

On Windows a makeinstaller target is provided which will build a binary installer. For that to work, you need to have Inno Setup on Windows. The installer builder needs to be installed and on the system PATH. You need to have the Qt libraries on the system PATH as well.

Compiling on Windows

Method 1 (nmake)

Not everyone has access to or is comfortable with Visual Studio but there is an alternative. Microsoft provides the Windows SDK which contains all of the tools necessary to build.

First you need to install the .Net Framework 4. You will also need the Windows SDK. Finally, if you are on a x64 platform and plan to produce x64 builds you will need to install the hot fix refererend by this KB article.

Once you have the necessary tools installed you can run cmake in a cmd (use the Windows SDK Command Prompt) to produce an nmake based project (this is default). Then you can run nmake makeinstaller to build and create an installer package.

Method 2 (Visual Studio)

You can generate Visual Studio project files 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.

NOTE: This method is not used by any Sigil developers.

Compiling on Mac

Method 1 (make)

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../sigil-code-dir
$ make
$ make makedmg

NOTE: Notice that there is no trailing / at the end of the cmake line.

Method 2 (XCode)

You can generate Xcode project files 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

You will need to install Qt4 including, any dependencies and development packages if your distro provides separate dev packages. Also, many distros split the Qt packages into multiple subpackages. XML, SVG, and WebKit support are required.

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

Building from source in the git repository is NOT recommended, since code in the git repository is not stable. Do not open a bug report against a non release version.

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-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

-no-qt3support -nomake examples -nomake demos -nomake docs

to configure as well. For Visual Studio builds, passing

-ltcg

is also strongly recommended.

Posting Comments/Questions

Please use the Sigil Forum at MobileRead for all questions/comments. Comments on this wiki will be removed.