<?xml version="1.0"?> <html> <body> <h1><a name="installation">libvirt Installation</a></h1> <ul id="toc"></ul> <h2><a name="compiling">Compiling a release tarball</a></h2> <p> libvirt uses the standard configure/make/install steps: </p> <pre> $ gunzip -c libvirt-x.x.x.tar.gz | tar xvf - $ cd libvirt-x.x.x $ ./configure</pre> <p> The <i>configure</i> script can be given options to change its default behaviour. </p> <p> To get the complete list of the options it can take, pass it the <i>--help</i> option like this: </p> <pre> $ ./configure <i>--help</i></pre> <p> When you have determined which options you want to use (if any), continue the process. </p> <p> Note the use of <b>sudo</b> with the <i>make install</i> 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. </p> <p> If you are installing to a location that your user <i>does</i> have write access to, then you can instead run the <i>make install</i> command without putting <b>sudo</b> before it. </p> <pre> $ ./configure <i>[possible options]</i> $ make $ <b>sudo</b> <i>make install</i></pre> <p> At this point you <b>may</b> have to run ldconfig or a similar utility to update your list of installed shared libs. </p> <h2><a name="building">Building from a GIT checkout</a></h2> <p> 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 <code>autogen.sh</code> command. By default when the <code>configure</code> script is run from within a GIT checkout, it will turn on -Werror for builds. This can be disabled with --disable-werror, but this is not recommended. To build & install libvirt to your home directory the following commands can be run: </p> <pre> $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=$HOME/usr $ make $ <b>sudo</b> make install</pre> <p> Be aware though, that binaries built with a custom prefix will not interoperate with OS vendor provided binaries, since the UNIX socket paths will all be different. To produce a build that is compatible with normal OS vendor prefixes, use </p> <pre> $ ./autogen.sh --system $ make </pre> <p> When doing this for day-to-day development purposes, it is recommended not to install over the OS vendor provided binaries. Instead simply run libvirt directly from the source tree. For example to run a privileged libvirtd instance </p> <pre> $ su - # service libvirtd stop (or systemctl stop libvirtd.service) # /home/to/your/checkout/daemon/libvirtd </pre> <p> It is also possible to run virsh directly from the source tree using the ./run script (which sets some environment variables): </p> <pre> $ ./run ./tools/virsh .... </pre> </body> </html>