The latest versions of the libvirt C library can be downloaded from:
Once an hour, an automated snapshot is made from the git server source tree. These snapshots should be usable, but we make no guarantees about their stability:
Libvirt code source is now maintained in a git repository available on libvirt.org:
git clone git://libvirt.org/libvirt.git
It can also be browsed at
http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=summary
As most UNIX libraries libvirt follows the "standard":
gunzip -c libvirt-xxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd libvirt-xxxx
./configure --help
to see the options, then the compilation/installation proper
./configure [possible options]
make
make install
At that point you may have to rerun 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
make
make install