Installation

This is a brief overview of building and installing from source on the command line using meson. Building requires a relatively modern C compiler (GCC, Clang, and MSVC are tested), meson, and its dependencies Python and (by default) ninja. It can also generate projects for popular IDEs, see the meson configure --backend option for details.

Configuring

The build is configured with the setup command, which creates a new build directory with the given name:

meson setup build

The environment variables CC and CC_LD, if set, give the C compiler and linker during setup, but otherwise it’s best to configure via meson options. After setup, enter the build directory (and stay):

cd build

From here, the build configuration can be inspected:

meson configure

Options can be set by passing C-style “define” options to configure:

meson configure -Dc_args="-march=native" -Dprefix="/opt/mypackage/"

Building

Once configured, the compile command will build everything, and the test command will run all tests:

meson compile
meson test

Installing

A compiled project can be installed with the install command:

meson install

You may need to acquire root permissions to install to a system-wide prefix. For packaging, the installation may be staged to a directory using the DESTDIR environment variable or the meson install --destdir option:

DESTDIR=/tmp/mypackage/ meson install
meson install --destdir=/tmp/mypackage/