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 inside the clone 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 3.0.5+
git
python 2.7 or 3.4+ (you'll need not just the interpreter but python-dev)
node.js 0.10.x or 0.12.x (you'll need not just the interpreter but nodejs-dev)
CMake 2.8.8+

For Debian-like distros the below command installs the basic set:

```bash sudo apt-get install git build-essential swig3.0 python-dev nodejs-dev cmake ```

To build the documentation you'll also need:

Doxygen 1.8.9.1+
Graphviz 2+ (For Doxygen graph generation)
Sphinx 1.1.3+ (For Python docs)

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.

After that you can install built files (into default path) by running:

```bash sudo make install ```

See flags for adjusting install paths in the section below.

Currently our install logic puts Python bindings into standard paths, which do not work on Debian due to their policy.

We are working on a permanent solution, in the meanwhile please use this command after make install to link installed modules where Debian's Python expects them:

```bash sudo ln -s <your install prefix, e.g. /usr>/lib/python2.7/site-packages/* /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages ```

Same approach works for Python 3, you'll just need to adjust the version number in the path accordingly.

Configuration flags

Our CMake configuration 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 (< 3.0.2) requires the disabling of JavaScript: -DBUILDSWIGNODE=OFF

Disabling Python module building: -DBUILDSWIGPYTHON=OFF

Building doc, this will require SPHINX & Doxygen: -DBUILDDOC=ON

Building with Python 3 (careful you need to clear CMake cache between Python version switches!) -DBUILDPYTHON3=ON

Override build architecture (this is useful because on x86 ARM code is not compiled so use this flag to force the target arch) -DBUILDARCH=arm

Dependencies continued

You'll need at least SWIG version 3.0.2 and we recommend 3.0.5 to build the JavaScript & Python modules. If your version of SWIG is older than this then please see above for disabling SWIGNODE. Otherwise you will get a weird build failure when building the JavaScript module. The Python module builds with SWIG 2.x.

During the build, 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 from 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 1.7.2 SDK. First source the environment file, then use our CMake toolchain file.

 source /opt/poky-edison/1.7.2/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

Building Java bindings

Have JAVA_HOME set to JDK install directory. Most distributions set this from /etc/profile.d/ and have a way of switching between alternatives. We support both OpenJDK and Oracle's JDK. On Arch Linux with OpenJDK 8 you'll have to set this yourself like this:

1 export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default/

Then use the CMake configuration flag: -DBUILDSWIGJAVA=ON To compile Example.java

1 javac -cp $DIR_WHERE_YOU_INSTALLED_MRAA/mraa.jar:. Example.java

To run, make sure libmraajava.so is in LD_LIBRARY_PATH

1 jave -cp $DIR_WHERE_YOU_INSTALLED_MRAA/mraa.jar:. Example

Building an IPK/RPM package using `cpack`

You can get cpack to generate an IPK or RPM package fairly easily if you have the correct packaging tools

1 cmake -DIPK=ON -DCMAKE_INSTAL_PREFIX=/usr ..

2 make package

To use RPM simply enable the RPM option. You'll need rpmbuild installed on your build machine.

1 cmake -DRPM=ON -DCMAKE_INSTAL_PREFIX=/usr ..