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Compiling the GTK+ librariesCompiling the GTK+ Libraries — How to compile GTK+ itself |
Before we get into the details of how to compile GTK+, we should mention that in many cases, binary packages of GTK+ prebuilt for your operating system will be available, either from your operating system vendor or from independent sources. If such a set of packages is available, installing it will get you programming with GTK+ much faster than building it yourself. In fact, you may well already have GTK+ installed on your system already.
In order to build GTK+, you will need meson installed on your system. On Linux, and other UNIX-like operating systems, you will also need ninja. This guide does not cover how to install these two requirements, but you can refer to the Meson website for more information. The Ninja build tool is also usable on various operating systems, so we will refer to it in the examples.
If you are building GTK+ from a source distribution or from a Git
clone, you will need to use meson to
configure the project. The most commonly useful argument is the
--prefix
one, which determines where the
files will go once installed. To install GTK+ under a prefix
like /opt/gtk
you would run Meson as:
meson --prefix /opt/gtk builddir
Meson will create the builddir
directory and
place all the build artefacts there.
You can get a list of all available options for the build by running meson configure.
After Meson successfully configured the build directory, you then can run the build, using Ninja:
cd builddir ninja ninja install
If you don't have permission to write to the directory you are
installing in, you may have to change to root temporarily before
running ninja install
.
Several environment variables are useful to pass to set before
running configure. CPPFLAGS
contains options to
pass to the C compiler, and is used to tell the compiler where
to look for include files. The LDFLAGS
variable
is used in a similar fashion for the linker. Finally the
PKG_CONFIG_PATH
environment variable contains
a search path that pkg-config (see below)
uses when looking for files describing how to compile
programs using different libraries. If you were installing GTK+
and it's dependencies into /opt/gtk
, you
might want to set these variables as:
CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/gtk/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/gtk/lib" PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig" export CPPFLAGS LDFLAGS PKG_CONFIG_PATH
You may also need to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
environment variable so the systems dynamic linker can find
the newly installed libraries, and the PATH
environment program so that utility binaries installed by
the various libraries will be found.
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/gtk/lib" PATH="/opt/gtk/bin:$PATH" export LD_LIBRARY_PATH PATH
Before you can compile the GTK+ widget toolkit, you need to have various other tools and libraries installed on your system. Dependencies of GTK+ have their own build systems, so you will need to refer to their own installation instructions.
A particular important tool used by GTK+ to find its dependencies is pkg-config.
pkg-config
is a tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for
libraries that are used by the GTK+ libraries. (For each
library, a small .pc
text file is installed
in a standard location that contains the compilation flags
needed for that library along with version number information.)
Some of the libraries that GTK+ depends on are maintained by by the GTK+ team: GLib, GdkPixbuf, Pango, ATK and GObject Introspection. Other libraries are maintained separately.
The GLib library provides core non-graphical functionality such as high level data types, Unicode manipulation, and an object and type system to C programs. It is available from here.
The GdkPixbuf library provides facilities for loading images in a variety of file formats. It is available here.
Pango is a library for internationalized text handling. It is available here.
ATK is the Accessibility Toolkit. It provides a set of generic interfaces allowing accessibility technologies such as screen readers to interact with a graphical user interface. It is available here.
Gobject Introspection is a framework for making introspection data available to language bindings. It is available here.
External dependencies
The GNU
libiconv library is needed to build GLib if your
system doesn't have the iconv()
function for doing conversion between character
encodings. Most modern systems should have
iconv()
.
The libintl library from the GNU gettext
package is needed if your system doesn't have the
gettext()
functionality for handling
message translation databases.
The libraries from the X window system are needed to build Pango and GTK+. You should already have these installed on your system, but it's possible that you'll need to install the development environment for these libraries that your operating system vendor provides.
The fontconfig library provides Pango with a standard way of locating fonts and matching them against font names.
Cairo is a graphics library that supports vector graphics and image compositing. Both Pango and GTK+ use Cairo for drawing.
libepoxy is a library that abstracts the differences between different OpenGL libraries. GTK+ uses it for cross-platform GL support and for its own drawing.
Graphene is a library that provides vector and matrix types for 2D and 3D transformations. GTK+ uses it internally for drawing.
The Wayland libraries are needed to build GTK+ with the Wayland backend.
The shared-mime-info
package is not a hard dependency of GTK+, but it contains definitions
for mime types that are used by GIO and, indirectly, by GTK+.
gdk-pixbuf will use GIO for mime type detection if possible. For this
to work, shared-mime-info needs to be installed and
XDG_DATA_DIRS
set accordingly at configure time.
Otherwise, gdk-pixbuf falls back to its built-in mime type detection.
First make sure that you have the necessary external dependencies installed: pkg-config, Meson, Ninja, the JPEG, PNG, and TIFF libraries, FreeType, and, if necessary, libiconv and libintl. To get detailed information about building these packages, see the documentation provided with the individual packages. On any average Linux system, it's quite likely you'll have all of these installed already, or they will be easily accessible through your operating system package repositories.
Then build and install the GTK+ libraries in the order: GLib, Cairo, Pango, ATK, then GTK+. For each library, follow the instructions they provide, and make sure to share common settings between them and the GTK+ build; if you are using a separate prefix for GTK+, for instance, you will need to use the same prefix for all its dependencies you build. If you're lucky, this will all go smoothly, and you'll be ready to start compiling your own GTK+ applications. You can test your GTK+ installation by running the gtk4-demo program that GTK+ installs.
If one of the projects you're configuring or building fails, look closely at the error messages printed; these will often provide useful information as to what went wrong. Every build system has its own log that can help you understand the issue you're encountering. If all else fails, you can ask for help on the gtk-list mailing list. See Mailing lists and bug reports(3) for more information.
In addition to the normal options provided by Meson, GTK+ defines various arguments that modify what should be built.
meson
[ -Dx11-backend=true | -Dx11-backend=false ]
[ -Dwayland-backend=true | -Dwayland-backend=false ]
[ -Dbroadway-backend=true | -Dbroadway-backend=false ]
[ -Dwin32-backend=true | -Dwin32-backend=false ]
[ -Dquartz-backend=true | -Dquartz-backend=false ]
[ -Dmedia=gstreamer | -Dmedia=ffmpeg | -Dmedia=all | -Dmedia=none ]
[ -Dvulkan=yes | -Dvulkan=no | -Dvulkan=auto ]
[ -Dxinerama=yes | -Dxinerama=no | -Dxinerama=auto ]
[ -Dcloudproviders=true | -Dcloudproviders=false ]
[ -Dprint-backends=all | -Dprint-backends=none | -Dprint-backends=cups,lpr,... ]
[ -Dcolord=yes | -Dcolord=no | -Dcolord=auto ]
[ -Ddocumentation=true | -Ddocumentation=false ]
[ -Dman-pages=true | -Dman-pages=false ]
[ -Dintrospection=true | -Dintrospection=false ]
xinerama
.
By default GTK+ will try to link against the Xinerama libraries
if they are found. This options can be used to explicitly control
whether Xinerama should be used.
documentation
and
man-pages
.
The gtk-doc package is
used to generate the reference documentation included
with GTK+. By default support for gtk-doc
is disabled because it requires various extra dependencies
to be installed. If you have
gtk-doc installed and
are modifying GTK+, you may want to enable
gtk-doc support by passing
in documentation
.
Additionally, some tools provided by GTK+ have their own
manual pages generated using a similar set of dependencies;
if you have xsltproc then you
can generate manual pages by passing man-pages
when configuring the build.
print-backends
.
By default, GTK+ will try to build various print backends if
their dependencies are found. This option can be used to
explicitly control which print backends should be built.
x11-backend
,
win32-backend
,
quartz-backend
,
broadway-backend
and
wayland-backend
.
Enable specific backends for GDK. If none of these options
are given, the Wayland backend will be enabled by default,
if the platform is Linux; the X11 backend will also be enabled
by default, unless the platform is Windows, in which case the
default is win32, or the platform is macOS, in which case the
default is quartz. If any backend is explicitly enabled or disabled,
no other platform will be enabled automatically.
introspection
.
Allows to disable building introspection support. This is option
is mainly useful for shortening turnaround times on developer
systems. Installed builds of GTK+ should always have introspection
support.
build-tests
,
install-tests
,
demos
.
By default, GTK+ will build quite a few tests and demos.
While these are useful on a developer system, they are not
needed when GTK+ is built e.g. for a flatpak runtime. These
options allow to disable building tests and demos.