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<refentry id="gtk-building">
<refmeta>
<refentrytitle>Compiling the GTK+ libraries</refentrytitle>
<manvolnum>3</manvolnum>
<refmiscinfo>GTK Library</refmiscinfo>
</refmeta>

<refnamediv>
<refname>Compiling the GTK+ Libraries</refname>
<refpurpose>
How to compile GTK+ itself
</refpurpose>
</refnamediv>
  <refsect1 id="overview">
    <title>Building GTK+ on UNIX-like systems</title>
    <para>
      This chapter covers building and installing GTK+ on UNIX and
      UNIX-like systems such as Linux. Compiling GTK+ on Microsoft
      Windows is different in detail and somewhat more difficult to
      get going since the necessary tools aren't included with
      the operating system.
    </para>
    <para>
      Before we get into the details of how to compile GTK+, we should
      mention that in many cases, binary packages of GTK+ prebuilt for
      your operating system will be available, either from your
      operating system vendor or from independent sources. If such a
      set of packages is available, installing it will get you
      programming with GTK+ much faster than building it yourself. In
      fact, you may well already have GTK+ installed on your system
      already.
    </para>
    <para>
      On UNIX-like systems GTK+ uses the standard GNU build system,
      using <application>autoconf</application> for package
      configuration and resolving portability issues,
      <application>automake</application> for building makefiles that
      comply with the GNU Coding Standards, and
      <application>libtool</application> for building shared libraries
      on multiple platforms.
    </para>
    <para>
      If you are building GTK+ from the distributed source packages,
      then you won't need these tools installed; the necessary pieces
      of the tools are already included in the source packages. But
      it's useful to know a bit about how packages that use these
      tools work. A source package is distributed as a
      <literal>tar.bz2</literal> or <literal>tar.xz</literal> file
      which you unpack into a directory full of the source files as follows:
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      tar xvfj gtk+-3.2.0.tar.bz2
      tar xvfJ gtk+-3.2.0.tar.xz
    </programlisting>
    <para>
      In the toplevel directory that is created, there will be
      a shell script called <filename>configure</filename> which
      you then run to take the template makefiles called
      <filename>Makefile.in</filename> in the package and create
      makefiles customized for your operating system.
      The <filename>configure</filename> script can be passed
      various command line arguments to determine how the package
      is built and installed. The most commonly useful argument is
      the <systemitem>--prefix</systemitem> argument which
      determines where the package is installed. To install a package
      in <filename>/opt/gtk</filename> you would run configure as:
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
    </programlisting>
    <para>
      A full list of options can be found by running
      <filename>configure</filename> with the
      <systemitem>--help</systemitem> argument. In general, the defaults are
      right and should be trusted. After you've run
      <filename>configure</filename>, you then run the
      <command>make</command> command to build the package and install
      it.
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      make
      make install
    </programlisting>
    <para>
      If you don't have permission to write to the directory you are
      installing in, you may have to change to root temporarily before
      running <literal>make install</literal>. Also, if you are
      installing in a system directory, on some systems (such as
      Linux), you will need to run <command>ldconfig</command> after
      <literal>make install</literal> so that the newly installed
      libraries will be found.
    </para>
    <para>
      Several environment variables are useful to pass to set before
      running configure. <envar>CPPFLAGS</envar> contains options to
      pass to the C compiler, and is used to tell the compiler where
      to look for include files. The <envar>LDFLAGS</envar> variable
      is used in a similar fashion for the linker. Finally the
      <envar>PKG_CONFIG_PATH</envar> environment variable contains
      a search path that <command>pkg-config</command> (see below)
      uses when looking for files describing how to compile
      programs using different libraries. If you were installing GTK+
      and it's dependencies into <filename>/opt/gtk</filename>, you
      might want to set these variables as:
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/gtk/include"
      LDFLAGS="-L/opt/gtk/lib"
      PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig"
      export CPPFLAGS LDFLAGS PKG_CONFIG_PATH
    </programlisting>
    <para>
      You may also need to set the <envar>LD_LIBRARY_PATH</envar>
      environment variable so the systems dynamic linker can find
      the newly installed libraries, and the <envar>PATH</envar>
      environment program so that utility binaries installed by
      the various libraries will be found.
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/gtk/lib"
      PATH="/opt/gtk/bin:$PATH"
      export LD_LIBRARY_PATH PATH
    </programlisting>
  </refsect1>
  <refsect1 id="dependencies">
    <title>Dependencies</title>
    <para>
      Before you can compile the GTK+ widget toolkit, you need to have
      various other tools and libraries installed on your
      system. The two tools needed during the build process (as
      differentiated from the tools used in when creating GTK+
      mentioned above such as <application>autoconf</application>)
      are <command>pkg-config</command> and GNU make.
    </para>
    <itemizedlist>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          <ulink
          url="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/">pkg-config</ulink>
          is a tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for
          libraries that are used by the GTK+ libraries. (For each
          library, a small <literal>.pc</literal> text file is installed
          in a standard location that contains the compilation flags
          needed for that library along with version number information.)
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          The GTK+ makefiles will mostly work with different versions
          of <command>make</command>, however, there tends to be
          a few incompatibilities, so the GTK+ team recommends
          installing <ulink url="https://www.gnu.org/software/make">GNU
            make</ulink> if you don't already have it on your system
          and using it. (It may be called <command>gmake</command>
          rather than <command>make</command>.)
        </para>
      </listitem>
    </itemizedlist>
    <para>
      Some of the libraries that GTK+ depends on are maintained by
      by the GTK+ team: GLib, GdkPixbuf, Pango, ATK and GObject Introspection.
      Other libraries are maintained separately.
    </para>
    <itemizedlist>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          The GLib library provides core non-graphical functionality
          such as high level data types, Unicode manipulation, and
          an object and type system to C programs. It is available
          from the <ulink url="https://ftp.gtk.org/pub/glib/">GTK+
          FTP site</ulink> or
          <ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/glib/">here</ulink>.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          The <ulink url="https://git.gnome.org/browse/gdk-pixbuf/">GdkPixbuf library</ulink>
          provides facilities for loading images in a variety of file formats.
          It is available
          <ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/gdk-pixbuf/">here</ulink>.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          <ulink url="http://www.pango.org">Pango</ulink> is a library
          for internationalized text handling. It is available
          <ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/pango/">here</ulink>.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          ATK is the Accessibility Toolkit. It provides a set of generic
          interfaces allowing accessibility technologies such as
          screen readers to interact with a graphical user interface.
          It is available
          <ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/atk/">here</ulink>.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          <ulink url="https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GObjectIntrospection">Gobject Introspection</ulink>
          is a framework for making introspection data available to
          language bindings. It is available
          <ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/gobject-introspection/">here</ulink>.
        </para>
      </listitem>
    </itemizedlist>
    <itemizedlist>
      <title>External dependencies</title>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          The <ulink url="https://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/">GNU
          libiconv library</ulink> is needed to build GLib if your
          system doesn't have the <function>iconv()</function>
          function for doing conversion between character
          encodings. Most modern systems should have
          <function>iconv()</function>.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          The libintl library from the <ulink
          url="https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/">GNU gettext
          package</ulink> is needed if your system doesn't have the
          <function>gettext()</function> functionality for handling
          message translation databases.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          The libraries from the X window system are needed to build
          Pango and GTK+. You should already have these installed on
          your system, but it's possible that you'll need to install
          the development environment for these libraries that your
          operating system vendor provides.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          The <ulink url="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fontconfig/">fontconfig</ulink>
          library provides Pango with a standard way of locating
          fonts and matching them against font names.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          <ulink url="https://www.cairographics.org">Cairo</ulink>
          is a graphics library that supports vector graphics and image
          compositing. Both Pango and GTK+ use cairo for all of their
          drawing.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          <ulink url="https://github.com/anholt/libepoxy">libepoxy</ulink>
          is a library that abstracts the differences between different
          OpenGL libraries. GTK+ uses it for cross-platform GL support.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          The <ulink url="https://wayland.freedesktop.org">Wayland</ulink> libraries
          are needed to build GTK+ with the Wayland backend.
        </para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>
          The <ulink url="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/shared-mime-info">shared-mime-info</ulink>
          package is not a hard dependency of GTK+, but it contains definitions
          for mime types that are used by GIO and, indirectly, by GTK+.
          gdk-pixbuf will use GIO for mime type detection if possible. For this
          to work, shared-mime-info needs to be installed and
          <envar>XDG_DATA_DIRS</envar> set accordingly at configure time.
          Otherwise, gdk-pixbuf falls back to its built-in mime type detection.
        </para>
      </listitem>
    </itemizedlist>
  </refsect1>
  <refsect1 id="building">
    <title>Building and testing GTK+</title>
    <para>
      First make sure that you have the necessary external
      dependencies installed: <command>pkg-config</command>, GNU make,
      the JPEG, PNG, and TIFF libraries, FreeType, and, if necessary,
      libiconv and libintl. To get detailed information about building
      these packages, see the documentation provided with the
      individual packages.
      On a Linux system, it's quite likely you'll have all of these
      installed already except for <command>pkg-config</command>.
    </para>
    <para>
      Then build and install the GTK+ libraries in the order:
      GLib, Pango, ATK, then GTK+. For each library, follow the
      steps of <literal>configure</literal>, <literal>make</literal>,
      <literal>make install</literal> mentioned above. If you're
      lucky, this will all go smoothly, and you'll be ready to
      <link linkend="gtk-compiling">start compiling your own GTK+
      applications</link>. You can test your GTK+ installation
      by running the <command>gtk3-demo</command> program that
      GTK+ installs.
    </para>
    <para>
      If one of the <filename>configure</filename> scripts fails or running
      <command>make</command> fails, look closely at the error
      messages printed; these will often provide useful information
      as to what went wrong. When <filename>configure</filename>
      fails, extra information, such as errors that a test compilation
      ran into, is found in the file <filename>config.log</filename>.
      Looking at the last couple of hundred lines in this file will
      frequently make clear what went wrong. If all else fails, you
      can ask for help on the gtk-list mailing list.
      See <xref linkend="gtk-resources"/> for more information.
    </para>
  </refsect1>
      <refsect1 id="extra-configuration-options">
      <title>Extra Configuration Options</title>

      <para>
        In addition to the normal options, the
        <command>configure</command> script for the GTK+ library
        supports a number of additional arguments. (Command line
        arguments for the other GTK+ libraries are described in
        the documentation distributed with the those libraries.)

        <cmdsynopsis>
          <command>configure</command>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-modules</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-modules</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg>--with-included-immodules=MODULE1,MODULE2,...</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-debug=[no/minimum/yes]</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-Bsymbolic</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-Bsymbolic</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-xkb</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-xkb</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-xinerama</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-xinerama</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-gtk-doc</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-gtk-doc</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-cups</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-cups</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-papi</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-papi</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-xinput</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-xinput</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-packagekit</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-packagekit</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-x11-backend</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-x11-backend</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-win32-backend</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-win32-backend</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-quartz-backend</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-quartz-backend</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-broadway-backend</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-broadway-backend</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-wayland-backend</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-wayland-backend</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-mir-backend</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-mir-backend</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-introspection=[no/auto/yes]</arg>
          </group>
          <sbr/>
          <group>
            <arg choice="plain">--enable-installed-tests</arg>
            <arg choice="plain">--disable-installed-tests</arg>
          </group>
        </cmdsynopsis>
      </para>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-modules</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-modules</systemitem></title>

        <para>
          Normally GTK+ will try to build the input method modules
          as little shared libraries that are loaded on demand.
          The <systemitem>--disable-modules</systemitem> argument
          indicates that they should all be built statically
          into the GTK+ library instead. This is useful for
          people who need to produce statically-linked binaries.
          If neither <systemitem>--disable-modules</systemitem> nor
          <systemitem>--enable-modules</systemitem> is specified,
          then the <command>configure</command> script will try to
          auto-detect whether shared modules work on your system.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--with-included-immodules</systemitem></title>

        <para>
         This option allows you to specify which input method modules you
         want to include directly into the GTK+ shared library, as opposed
         to building them as loadable modules.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--enable-debug</systemitem></title>

        <para>
         Turns on various amounts of debugging support. Setting this to
         'no' disables g_assert(), g_return_if_fail(), g_return_val_if_fail()           and all cast checks between different object types. Setting it
         to 'minimum' disables only cast checks. Setting it to 'yes' enables
         <link linkend="GTK-Debug-Options">runtime debugging</link>.
         The default is 'minimum'.
         Note that 'no' is fast, but dangerous as it tends to destabilize
         even mostly bug-free software by changing the effect of many bugs
         from simple warnings into fatal crashes. Thus
         <option>--enable-debug=no</option> should <emphasis>not</emphasis>
         be used for stable releases of GTK+.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-Bsymbolic</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-Bsymbolic</systemitem></title>
        <para>
          The option <systemitem>--disable-Bsymbolic</systemitem>
          turns off the use of the -Bsymbolic-functions linker flag.
          This is only necessary if you want to override GTK+ functions
          by using <envar>LD_PRELOAD</envar>.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--enable-explicit-deps</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--disable-explicit-deps</systemitem></title>
        <para>
          If <systemitem>--enable-explicit-deps</systemitem> is
          specified then GTK+ will write the full set of libraries
          that GTK+ depends upon into its <literal>.pc</literal> files to be used when
          programs depending on GTK+ are linked. Otherwise, GTK+
          only will include the GTK+ libraries themselves, and
          will depend on system library dependency facilities to
          bring in the other libraries.
          By default GTK+ will disable explicit dependencies unless
          it detects that they are needed on the system. (If you
          specify <systemitem>--enable-static</systemitem> to force
          building of static libraries, then explicit dependencies
          will be written since library dependencies don't work
          for static libraries.) Specifying
          <systemitem>--enable-explicit-deps</systemitem> or
          <systemitem>--enable-static</systemitem> can cause
          compatibility
          problems when libraries that GTK+ depends upon change
          their versions, and should be avoided if possible.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-xkb</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-xkb</systemitem></title>

        <para>
          By default the <command>configure</command> script will try
          to auto-detect whether the XKB extension is supported by
          the X libraries GTK+ is linked with.
          These options can be used to explicitly control whether
          GTK+ will support the XKB extension.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-xinerama</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-xinerama</systemitem></title>

        <para>
          By default the <command>configure</command> script will try
          to link against the Xinerama libraries if they are found.
          These options can be used to explicitly control whether
          Xinerama should be used.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-xinput</systemitem> and
           <systemitem>--enable-xinput</systemitem></title>
        <para>
          Controls whether GTK+ is built with support for the XInput
          or XInput2 extension. These extensions provide an extended
          interface to input devices such as graphics tablets.
          When this support is compiled in, specially written
          GTK+ programs can get access to subpixel positions,
          multiple simultaneous input devices, and extra "axes"
          provided by the device such as pressure and tilt
          information.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-gtk-doc</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-gtk-doc</systemitem></title>

        <para>
          The <application>gtk-doc</application> package is
          used to generate the reference documentation included
          with GTK+. By default support for <application>gtk-doc</application>
          is disabled because it requires various extra dependencies
          to be installed. If you have
          <application>gtk-doc</application> installed and
          are modifying GTK+, you may want to enable
          <application>gtk-doc</application> support by passing
          in <systemitem>--enable-gtk-doc</systemitem>. If not
          enabled, pre-generated HTML files distributed with GTK+
          will be installed.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-cups</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-cups</systemitem></title>

        <para>
          By default the <command>configure</command> script will try
          to build the cups print backend if the cups libraries are found.
          These options can be used to explicitly control whether
          the cups print backend should be built.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-papi</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-papi</systemitem></title>

        <para>
          By default the <command>configure</command> script will try
          to build the papi print backend if the papi libraries are found.
          These options can be used to explicitly control whether
          the papi print backend should be built.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-packagekit</systemitem> and
           <systemitem>--enable-packagekit</systemitem></title>
        <para>
          By default the <command>configure</command> script will try
          to build the PackageKit support for the open-with dialog if
          the PackageKit libraries are found.
          These options can be used to explicitly control whether
          PackageKit support should be built.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--enable-x11-backend</systemitem>,
          <systemitem>--disable-x11-backend</systemitem>,
          <systemitem>--enable-win32-backend</systemitem>,
          <systemitem>--disable-win32-backend</systemitem>,
          <systemitem>--enable-quartz-backend</systemitem>,
          <systemitem>--disable-quartz-backend</systemitem>,
          <systemitem>--enable-broadway-backend</systemitem>,
          <systemitem>--disable-broadway-backend</systemitem>,
          <systemitem>--enable-wayland-backend</systemitem>,
          <systemitem>--disable-wayland-backend</systemitem>
          <systemitem>--enable-mir-backend</systemitem>, and
          <systemitem>--disable-mir-backend</systemitem></title>

        <para>
          Enables specific backends for GDK.  If none of these options
          are given, the x11 backend will be enabled by default,
          unless the platform is Windows, in which case the default is
          win32.  If any backend is explicitly enabled or disabled, no
          other platform will be enabled automatically.  Other
          supported backends are the quartz backend for OS X.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--enable-introspection</systemitem></title>

        <para>
          Build with or without introspection support.
          The default is 'auto'.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--enable-installed-tests</systemitem> or
           <systemitem>--disable-installed-tests</systemitem></title>

        <para>
          Whether to install tests on the system. If enabled, tests
          and their data are installed in <filename>${libexecdir}/gtk+/installed-tests</filename>.
          Metadata for the tests is installed in <filename>${prefix}/share/installed-tests/gtk+</filename>.
          To run the installed tests, gnome-desktop-testing-runner
          can be used.
        </para>
      </formalpara>
    </refsect1>

</refentry>

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