kitty/docs/build.rst
Kovid Goyal 9135387cfa
Get rid of the various different launchers
Now there is only one launcher. Which means it can be used to start
kitty with profiling and ASAN in the natural way. The recommended
way to run kitty from source is now:

./kitty/launcher/kitty

The launcher also automatically re-execs to resolve symlinks on macOS.
2019-06-24 17:21:30 +05:30

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Building kitty from source
==============================
.. image:: https://circleci.com/gh/kovidgoyal/kitty.svg?style=svg
:alt: Build status
:target: https://circleci.com/gh/kovidgoyal/kitty
|kitty| is designed to run from source, for easy hackability. Make sure
the following dependencies are installed first.
Dependencies
----------------
Run-time dependencies:
* python >= 3.5
* harfbuzz >= 1.5.0
* zlib
* libpng
* freetype (not needed on macOS)
* fontconfig (not needed on macOS)
* ImageMagick (optional, needed to use the ``kitty icat`` tool to display images in the terminal)
* pygments (optional, need for syntax highlighting in ``kitty +kitten diff``)
Build-time dependencies:
* gcc or clang
* pkg-config
* For building on Linux in addition to the above dependencies you might also need to install the ``-dev`` packages for:
``libdbus-1-dev``, ``libxcursor-dev``, ``libxrandr-dev``, ``libxi-dev``, ``libxinerama-dev``, ``libgl1-mesa-dev``, ``libxkbcommon-x11-dev``, ``libfontconfig-dev`` and ``libpython-dev``.
if they are not already installed by your distro.
Install and run from source
------------------------------
.. code-block:: sh
git clone https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty && cd kitty
Now build the native code parts of |kitty| with the following command::
make
You can run |kitty|, as::
./kitty/launcher/kitty
If that works, you can create a symlink to the launcher in :file:`~/bin` or
some other directory on your PATH so that you can run |kitty| using
just ``kitty``.
Building kitty.app on macOS from source
-------------------------------------------
Install `imagemagick`, `optipng` and `librsvg` using `brew` or similar (needed
for the logo generation step). And run::
make app
This :file:`kitty.app` unlike the released one does not include its own copy of
python and the other dependencies. So if you ever un-install/upgrade those dependencies
you might have to rebuild the app.
Note that the released :file:`kitty.dmg` includes all dependencies, unlike the
:file:`kitty.app` built above and is built automatically by using the :file:`kitty` branch of
`build-calibre <https://github.com/kovidgoyal/build-calibre>`_ however, that
is designed to run on Linux and is not for the faint of heart.
Note for Linux/macOS packagers
----------------------------------
The released |kitty| source code is available as a `tarball`_ from
`the GitHub releases page <https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/releases>`_.
While |kitty| does use python, it is not a traditional python package, so please
do not install it in site-packages.
Instead run::
python3 setup.py linux-package
This will install |kitty| into the directory :file:`linux-package`. You can run |kitty|
with :file:`linux-package/bin/kitty`. All the files needed to run kitty will be in
:file:`linux-package/lib/kitty`. The terminfo file will be installed into
:file:`linux-package/share/terminfo`. Simply copy these files into :file:`/usr` to install
|kitty|. In other words, :file:`linux-package` is the staging area into which |kitty| is
installed. You can choose a different staging area, by passing the ``--prefix``
argument to :file:`setup.py`.
You should probably split |kitty| into two packages, :file:`kitty-terminfo` that
installs the terminfo file and :file:`kitty` that installs the main program.
This allows users to install the terminfo file on servers into which they ssh,
without needing to install all of |kitty|.
.. note::
You need a couple of extra dependencies to build linux-package.
:file:`tic` to compile terminfo files, usually found in the
development package of :file:`ncurses`. Also, if you are building from
a git checkout instead of the released source code tarball, you will
need :file:`sphinx-build` from the `Sphinx documentation generator
<https://www.sphinx-doc.org/>`_.
This applies to creating packages for |kitty| for macOS package managers such as
brew or MacPorts as well.
.. note::
|kitty| has its own update check mechanism, if you would like to turn
it off for your package, use
``python3 setup.py linux-package --update-check-interval=0``