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Compiling and Installing

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Mauricio Ordoñez edited this page Sep 13, 2021 · 2 revisions

Installation

Table of contents

Platforms

You can download installers from the website. If you want to compile LibreSprite from source, continue reading.

You should be able to compile LibreSprite on the following platforms:

  • Windows 10 + VS2015 Community Edition + Windows 10 SDK
  • Mac OS X 10.11.4 El Capitan + Xcode 7.3 + OS X 10.11 SDK + Skia (without GPU)
  • Linux + gcc 4.8 with some C++11 support

To compile LibreSprite you will need:

Get the source code

Clone the repository and its submodules using the following command:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite

(You can use Git for Windows to clone the repository on Windows.)

To update an existing clone, use the following commands:

cd LibreSprite
git pull
git submodule update --init --recursive

Backends

LibreSprite can be compiled with two different backends:

  1. Allegro backend (Windows, Linux)
  2. Skia backend (Windows, MacOS)

NOTE: Work on a new backend to replace these is underway.

Dependencies

You'll need the following dependencies to compile LibreSprite:

Linux dependencies

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install cmake g++ libfreetype6-dev libgif-dev libgtest-dev libjpeg-dev libpixman-1-dev libpng-dev libtinyxml-dev libx11-dev libxcursor-dev ninja-build zlib1g-dev

The libxcursor-dev package is needed to hide the hardware cursor.

Windows dependencies

To install the required dependencies with vcpkg, run:

vcpkg install freetype giflib gtest libjpeg-turbo libpng libwebp pixman tinyxml zlib --triplet x64-windows

Beware: --triplet x64-windows is only necessary for a 64 architecture build.

MacOS dependencies

On MacOS you will need Mac OS X 10.11 SDK and Xcode 7.3 (older versions might work).

Compiling

First, create the build directory with the following commands:

cd LibreSprite
mkdir build
cd build

Then following the platform-specific instructions for compiling below.

The build directory will contain the results of the compilation process. If you want to build a fresh copy of LibreSprite, remove the build directory and recompile.

Linux details

To compile LibreSprite, run the following commands:

cmake -G Ninja ..
ninja libresprite

The repository contains a patched version of the Allegro 4 library. If you want to use your installed version of Allegro, run cmake with the flag -DUSE_SHARED_ALLEGRO4=ON. However, this is not recommended due to issues with Allegro 4.4 (1) (2).

Windows details

If you're using a command prompt and aiming for a x64 build, be sure to use the x64 prompt or it won't find vcpkg libraries.

To compile the Allegro backend, run the following commands:

cmake ^
  -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=put_your_vcpkg_path_here\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake ^
  -G Ninja ^
  ..

The repository contains a patched version of the Allegro 4 library. If you want to use your installed version of Allegro, run cmake with the flag -DUSE_SHARED_ALLEGRO4=ON.

To compile the Skia backend, first compile Skia and then run the following commands:

cmake ^
  -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=put_your_vcpkg_path_here\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake ^
  -DUSE_ALLEG4_BACKEND=OFF -DUSE_SKIA_BACKEND=ON -DSKIA_DIR=C:\deps\skia ^
  -G Ninja ^
  ..

In this case, C:\deps\skia is the directory where Skia was compiled.

MacOS details

[ ! ] MacOS is currently not available due to some issues with Skia

To compile LibreSprite, first compile Skia. Then run the following commands:

cmake \
  -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES=x86_64 \
  -DCMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.7 \
  -DCMAKE_OSX_SYSROOT=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.11.sdk \
  -DSKIA_DIR=$HOME/deps/skia \
  -G Ninja \
  ..
ninja libresprite

In this case, $HOME/deps/skia is the directory where Skia was compiled.

Skia on Windows

Download Google depot tools and uncompress it in some place like C:\deps\depot_tools.

Then open a command line and follow these steps (for VS2015):

call "%VS140COMNTOOLS%\vsvars32.bat"
set PATH=C:\deps\depot_tools;%PATH%
cd C:\deps\depot_tools
gclient sync

(The gclient command might print an error like Error: client not configured; see 'gclient config'. Just ignore it.)

cd C:\deps
git clone https://github.com/aseprite/skia.git
cd skia
git checkout aseprite-m53
python bin/sync-and-gyp

(The bin/sync-and-gyp will take some minutes because it downloads a lot of packages, please wait and re-run the same command in case it fails.)

ninja -C out/Release dm

For more information, see the official Skia documentation.

Skia on MacOS

These steps will create a deps folder in your home directory with a couple of subdirectories needed to build Skia (you can change the $HOME/deps with other directory). Some of these commands will take several minutes to finish:

mkdir $HOME/deps
cd $HOME/deps
git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git
git clone https://github.com/aseprite/skia.git
export PATH="${PWD}/depot_tools:${PATH}"
cd skia
git checkout aseprite-m53
python bin/sync-and-gyp
ninja -C out/Release dm

For more information, see the official Skia documentation.

Installing

Once you've finished compiling, you can install LibreSprite by running the following command from the build directory:

ninja install

LibreSprite Devs 2021

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