libvirt uses the standard configure/make/install steps:
$ gunzip -c libvirt-x.x.x.tar.gz | tar xvf -
$ cd libvirt-x.x.x
$ ./configure
The configure script can be given options to change its default behaviour.
To get the complete list of the options it can take, pass it the --help option like this:
$ ./configure --help
When you have determined which options you want to use (if any), continue the process.
Note the use of sudo with the make install command below. Using sudo is only required when installing to a location your user does not have write access to. Installing to a system location is a good example of this.
If you are installing to a location that your user does have write access to, then you can instead run the make install command without putting sudo before it.
$ ./configure [possible options]
$ make
$ sudo make install
At this point you may have to run ldconfig or a similar utility to update your list of installed shared libs.
The libvirt build process uses GNU autotools, so after obtaining a
checkout it is necessary to generate the configure script and Makefile.in
templates using the autogen.sh command, passing the extra
arguments as for configure. As an example, to do a complete build and
install it into your home directory run:
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=$HOME/usr --enable-compile-warnings=error
$ make
$ sudo make install