libvirt/docs/compiling.html.in
Jonathan Watt 1423c1d8bc docs: compiling.html: pass -d to xz to decompress
tar on macOS recognizes XZ compression automatically, but that is
not the case for GNU tar (1.32 at least).  On Fedora 33 the current
instructions result in the following error:

  $ xz -c libvirt-6.9.0.tar.xz | tar xvf -
  tar: Archive is compressed. Use -J option
  tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Reviewed-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Watt <jwatt@jwatt.org>
2020-11-13 16:22:43 +00:00

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<body>
<h1><a id="installation">libvirt Installation</a></h1>
<ul id="toc"></ul>
<h2><a id="compiling">Compiling a release tarball</a></h2>
<p>
libvirt uses the standard setup/build/install steps and mandates
that the build directory is different from the source directory:
</p>
<pre>
$ xz -dc libvirt-x.x.x.tar.xz | tar xvf -
$ cd libvirt-x.x.x
$ meson build</pre>
<p>
The <i>meson</i> script can be given options to change its default
behaviour.
</p>
<p>
To get the complete list of the options run the following command:
</p>
<pre>
$ meson configure</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>ninja 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>ninja install</i> command
without putting <b>sudo</b> before it.
</p>
<pre>
$ meson build <i>[possible options]</i>
$ ninja -C build
$ <b>sudo</b> <i>ninja -C build 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 id="building">Building from a GIT checkout</a></h2>
<p>
The libvirt build process uses Meson build system. By default when
the <code>meson</code> is run from within a GIT checkout, it
will turn on -Werror for builds. This can be disabled with
--werror=false, but this is not recommended.
</p>
<p>To build &amp; install libvirt to your home
directory the following commands can be run:
</p>
<pre>
$ meson build --prefix=$HOME/usr
$ ninja -C build
$ <b>sudo</b> ninja -C build 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>
$ meson build -Dsystem=true
$ ninja -C build
</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/src/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>