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. By default when
the configure 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:
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=$HOME/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install
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
$ ./autogen.sh --system
$ make
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
$ su -
# service libvirtd stop (or systemctl stop libvirtd.service)
# /home/to/your/checkout/daemon/libvirtd
It is also possible to run virsh directly from the source tree
$ ./tools/virsh ....
A normal configuration of libvirt will build hypervisor drivers
as loadable modules. When running from a non-installed source
tree, libvirtd will attempt to find the modules from the same
source tree. If this is not possible though, you can explicitly
set LIBVIRT_DRIVER_DIR=/path/to/source/tree/src/.libs