libmraa uses cmake in order to make compilation relatively painless. Cmake runs build out of tree so the recommended way is to clone from git and make a build/ directory.

Build dependencies

Not all these are required but if you're unsure of what you're doing this is what you'll need:

swig 3.0.4+
git
python 2.7 or 3.4+ (you'll need not just the interpreter but python-dev)
nodejs 0.10.x (you'll need not just the interneter but nodejs-dev)
cmake 2.8.8+

Basic build steps

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

If this goes wrong and you have all the dependencies installed, then please file an issue with the full output of cmake .. and make or however far you got.

Configuration flags

Our cmake configure has a number of options, cmake-gui or ccmake (cmake -i is no longer with us :() can show you all the options. A few of the more common ones are listed below - note that when the option starts with CMAKE_ it's an option that is made available by cmake and will be similar in all cmake projects. You need to add them after cmake but before ...

A few recommended options: Changing install path from /usr/local to /usr -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr

Building debug build - adds -g and disables optimisations - this will force a full rebuild: -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=DEBUG

Using clang instead of gcc: -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang++

Building with an older version of swig (swig < 3.0.2) requires the disabling of javascript: -DBUILDSWIGNODE=OFF

Disabling python module building -DBUILDSWIGPYTHON=OFF

Building doc, this will require sphinx & doxygen -BUILDDOC=ON

Dependancies continued

You'll need at least swig version 3.0.2 and we recommend 3.0.4 to build the javascript & python modules. If your version of SWIG is older than this then please see below for disabling SWIGNODE otherwise you will get a weird build failure when building the js module. The python module builds with swig 2.x.

The basic build steps are as follow, we'll assume you're building from git, note that if you compile with git installed your version of mraa will be tagged -dirty. This simply means git wasn't installed or that you where building form a tarball. You can modify build/src/version.c before running make if this is incorrect. The instructions listed here all assume that build/ is an empty dir that lives inside the cloned repository of mraa.

If you have multiple versions of python then mraa can get confused, we recommend using virtualenv to select which version of python you want. We test 2.7 the most but swig will generate valid 3.x python code but we do not generally support building both at once.

Using a yocto/oe toolchain

In order to compile with a yocto/oe toolchain use the following toolchain file. This works well on the edison 1.6 SDK. First source the environment file, then use our cmake toolchain file.

source /opt/poky-edison/1.6/environment-setup-core2-32-poky-linux
mkdir build
cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../cmake/Toolchains/oe-sdk_cross.cmake ..
make

Using coverity

Static analysis is routinely performed using coverity on libmraa's codebase. This is the procedure to submit a build to coverity. You'll need to install coverity-submit for your OS.

mkdir covbuild/ && cd covbuild
cmake -DBUILDDOC=OFF -DBUILDSWIG=OFF ..
cov-build --dir cov-int make
tar caf mraa.tar.bz2 cov-int