Installation

This document will guide you through all the steps required to get the balde libraries installed in your computer.

Dependencies

balde depends on a few external libraries and tools:

• GNU Make - http://www.gnu.org/software/make/
• GCC or clang - https://gcc.gnu.org/ - http://clang.llvm.org/
• GLib >= 2.35 - https://developer.gnome.org/glib/
• shared-mime-info - http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/shared-mime-info/

Download

All the releases are listed in the GitHub releases page. Please pick the latest one and download to your computer. We provide the sources as .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .tar.xz tarballs.

Warning

Please DO NOT download the tarballs generated automatically by GitHub. They are broken, because they are just snapshots of the Git repository, lacking most of the build system files. If you really want to use these tarballs you will need recent enough version of GNU Autotools and some other development tools to create the configure script.

Extract the sources in your current directory and enter it, using your terminal.

Configuring Build System

balde releases comes with a configure script, that accepts several command-line options (or arguments), to allow you to customize your balde installation:

• --enable-examples: This option enables the Makefile rules that builds the balde examples. Examples are NEVER installed to the system, but building them is useful to play with them in the local directory.
• --disable-http: This option disables the embedded HTTP server, that can be used during the development phase of your application. This is enabled by default, use the option to disable it if not needed, e.g. in production environment. See Application Command Line Interface for usage details.
• --disable-doc: This option disables the Makefile rules that are used to build this documentation. Documentation building rules are enabled by default, but depends on Doxygen being installed on your system. Normal users should not need to change this.

Some other options are available, but they are only useful for people developing balde framework itself. If you want to see additional options, please run ./configure --help.

To configure the build system and create the required Makefiles, run:

$ ./configure [options]

Where [options] is any of the options described previously.

Building

With everything configured, the user just needs to run:

$ make

This will build the library, binaries and the examples (if requested during the configuration phase).

Examples are built in the examples/ directory.

Installing

With the binaries built, the user just needs to run, as root:

# make install

This will install the library, binaries and headers to the system. Examples are never installed, as stated before.

The default installation prefix is /usr/local for linux users. This can be changed during the configuration phase, passing use the --prefix option to the configure script.

Bonus: Building documentation

To build a local copy of this documentation, if you do not disabled it during configuration phase, and have Doxygen installed, just run:

$ make doc

Bonus: Running tests

If you want to run balde test suite, just run:

$ make check