Compiling Inkscape

Hopefully, Inkscape will compile right out of the box, according to the 'Getting Started' instructions on https://inkscape.org/develop/getting-started/ . If it doesn't, well that's what this page is for.

If you've come here without reading the Getting Started page, please do so first, as it mentions some important things that this page does not.

Jot down notes, questions, findings, tips, etc. here on things you run into. It's a good idea to make mention of what version of the code you're trying to compile, the distribution you're running, and other such information that might be pertinent.

If legitimate bugs are found or patches developed, please move them to the tracker rather than inlining them here.

Notes

Please use CMake instead of Automake for Inkscape 0.92 onwards.

CMake is a crossplatform makefile generator similar to autotools. It tests dependencies and creates makefiles to be used with make.

Please see the CMake wiki page.

OS & Distribution Specific

• Linux
  • Ubuntu
  • Slackware
• Mac OS X
• Windows
• Chrome OS
• Cross-compiling
  • For OS X (from Linux)
  • For Windows (from Linux)

Package Config (pkg-config)

If you must compile and install any of these from source, you may find an error like this when trying to compile them or Inkscape itself:

checking for gtk+-2.0 >= 2.0.0  libxml-2.0 >= 2-2.4.24  sigc++-1.2  gtkmm-2.0... Package gtkmm-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtkmm-2.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'gtkmm-2.0' found

A solution is to set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable as so:

• for Bash: export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig
• for csh: setenv PKG_CONFIG_PATH /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig

A good place to put this line is in your .bashrc or .cshrc file.

Dependencies

If your distro does not have some packages available (like many don't, ie, Fedora Core 2), you must often download and build source packages and/or install them yourself. See Tracking Dependencies.

Developer Compilation

Plain vanilla compilation is done as documented in INSTALL.

Now, you should use CMake to compile Inkscape:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

For old versions of inkscape before 0.92, you can still use autoconf:

./autogen.sh # optionally
./configure
make

Then, to run tests and install Inkscape, you may do:

make check
sudo make install || su -c "make install"

See INSTALL.md for more on that.

But if you're going to be doing a lot of development, there's some tricks and techniques you should know, to get best results.

1. Turn off optimization.
2. Use ccache for faster compilation.
3. Set up a separate build directory (nice for testing both gcc and g++, or cross-compiling).
4. Use ninja or the make -j N flag to increment the number of threads available to make, with N = 1 + number of processors.

Example: Setting up the build environment (in separate tree), and using ccache for faster compilations on a dual-processor machine, with no optimization and full debug symbols, assuming /bin/bash:

mkdir build
git clone --recurse-submodules https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape.git
cd build
cmake ../inkscape -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=ccache -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -G Ninja
ninja

See Testing Inkscape for information on building and executing (unit) tests.

Internal lib2geom

If the version of Inkscape you are trying to build depends on recent lib2geom features, you'll need to add -DWITH_INTERNAL_2GEOM=ON to the cmake command to use the development version of lib2geom rather than the system version.