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patrick96 edited this page Nov 6, 2023 · 95 revisions

Please report any problems you run into when building the project.

Click here to check if polybar was already packaged for your distro.

Table of Contents

Dependencies

Here is a quick rundown of packages polybar needs to build and run correctly. See further below for more details and concrete package names for different distros.

A compiler with C++17 support (clang-7+, gcc-8+), cmake 3.5+, git

  • pkg-config
  • libuv
  • cairo
  • libxcb
  • python3
  • xcb-proto
  • xcb-util-image
  • xcb-util-wm
  • python-sphinx
  • python-packaging

Optional dependencies:

  • xcb-util-cursor required for the cursor-click and cursor-scroll settings
  • xcb-util-xrm required for accessing X resources with ${xrdb:...}

Optional dependencies for extended module support:

  • xcb-xkb required by internal/xkeyboard
  • alsa-lib required by internal/alsa
  • libpulse required by internal/pulseaudio
  • i3-wm and jsoncpp required by internal/i3
  • libmpdclient required by internal/mpd
  • libcurl required by internal/github
  • libnl-genl or wireless_tools required by internal/network

Build Dependencies

The following dependencies are only needed during compilation, you can remove them, if you don't need them, after you built polybar

Build Dependency apt-get Fedora openSUSE
gcc/g++ >= 8 g++ gcc-c++ gcc
clang >= 7 clang clang clang
git1 git git git
cmake >= 3.5 cmake
cmake-data 		cmake
@development-tools 		cmake
pkg-config pkg-config - -
python3 python3 python3 python3
sphinx python3-sphinx python3-sphinx python3-Sphinx
python-packaging python3-packaging python3-packaging python3-packaging

1 Only needed when not using the release archives

Note: You only need either gcc or clang.

All above dependencies paste-friendly for dnf (includes both gcc and clang):

sudo dnf install -y gcc-c++ clang git cmake @development-tools python3-sphinx python3-packaging

Dependencies

These are the hard dependencies, you cannot build or run polybar without them:

Dependency apt-get Fedora openSUSE
libuv >= 1.3 libuv1-dev libuv-devel libuv-devel
cairo libcairo2-dev cairo-devel cairo-devel
libxcb libxcb1-dev
libxcb-util0-dev
libxcb-randr0-dev
libxcb-composite0-dev 		xcb-util-devel
libxcb-devel 		xcb-util-devel
libxcb-devel
xcb-proto python3-xcbgen1
xcb-proto 		xcb-proto xcb-proto-devel
xcb-util-image libxcb-image0-dev xcb-util-image-devel xcb-util-image-devel
xcb-util-wm libxcb-ewmh-dev
libxcb-icccm4-dev 		xcb-util-wm-devel xcb-util-wm-devel

1 Before Ubuntu 20.04 (focal) and Debian 11 (bullseye), you need to install the python-xcbgen package because the python3-xcbgen package does not exist for those versions.

All above dependencies paste-friendly for apt:

apt install build-essential git cmake cmake-data pkg-config python3-sphinx python3-packaging libuv1-dev libcairo2-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-util0-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-composite0-dev python3-xcbgen xcb-proto libxcb-image0-dev libxcb-ewmh-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev

All above dependencies paste-friendly for dnf:

sudo dnf install -y cairo-devel libuv-devel xcb-util-devel libxcb-devel xcb-proto xcb-util-image-devel xcb-util-wm-devel

Optional Dependencies

These dependencies enable optional features in polybar, if they are installed during compilation:

Optional Dependency Required for apt-get Fedora openSUSE
xcb-xkb internal/xkeyboard libxcb-xkb-dev - libxcb-xkb1
xcb-util-xrm ${xrdb:...} libxcb-xrm-dev xcb-util-xrm-devel xcb-util-xrm-devel
xcb-util-cursor cursor-click
cursor-scroll 		libxcb-cursor-dev xcb-util-cursor-devel xcb-util-cursor-devel
alsa-lib internal/alsa libasound2-dev alsa-lib-devel alsa-devel
libpulse internal/pulseaudio libpulse-dev pulseaudio-libs-devel libpulse-devel
i3-wm internal/i3 i3-wm i3-devel i3-devel
jsoncpp internal/i3 libjsoncpp-dev jsoncpp-devel jsoncpp-devel
libmpdclient internal/mpd libmpdclient-dev libmpdclient-devel libmpdclient-devel
libcurl internal/github libcurl4-openssl-dev
(or libcurlpp-dev)		 libcurl-devel libcurl-devel
wireless_tools (deprecated)1 internal/network libiw-dev - wireless-tools
libiw-devel
libnl-genl1 internal/network libnl-genl-3-dev libnl3-devel libnl3-devel

1 You only need to install either libnl-genl or wireless-tools. If libnl-genl is installed it will be preferred over wireless-tools even if both are installed.

All above dependencies paste-friendly for apt:

apt install libxcb-xkb-dev libxcb-xrm-dev libxcb-cursor-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev i3-wm libjsoncpp-dev libmpdclient-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnl-genl-3-dev

All above dependencies paste-friendly for dnf:

sudo dnf install -y xcb-util-xrm-devel xcb-util-cursor-devel alsa-lib-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel i3-devel jsoncpp-devel libmpdclient-devel libcurl-devel libnl3-devel

Note: If you have enabled any optional feature during installation, the dependencies for that feature need to remain installed, otherwise polybar may not start.

Building

When building polybar from source, you can either download the polybar source code from a release archive or directly from the git repository.

Release Archive

Download the release archive polybar-<version>.tar.gz over at our release page and extract it with tar xvzf polybar-<version>.tar. Now change into the extracted folder (generally cd polybar-<version>)

Repository

To get the sources directly from the repository, run the following commands:

Warning: Compiling polybar this way will give you the latest unreleased changes, there may be bugs and it may break your config.

# Make sure to type the `git' command as-is to clone all git submodules too
git clone --recursive https://github.com/polybar/polybar
cd polybar

Compiling

Regardless of how you downloaded the sources, you should now be inside the folder where the polybar sources are located.

To compile, run the following commands:

Note: If you are using anaconda, run conda deactivate before running cmake, also see the note on the Known Issues page if that doesn't work.

Note: Similarly, if you are using pyenv, you will likely need to use system python during compilation. You can revert to system python in the current directory by executing pyenv local system directly before executing cmake.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)
# Optional. This will install the polybar executable in /usr/bin
sudo make install

Building with clang

In some circumstances the compilation might fail when using gcc and you will have to use clang to compile polybar.

To do that, in the cmake .. step above, run the following command instead:

cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="clang++" ..

BSD

Polybar was built with linux in mind and does not officially support the BSDs. That being said, there are a few lines of code to make polybar at least build on FreeBSD. So it should be possible to build polybar on FreeBSD using the same process as on linux (though you may need to pass the -DCMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" flag to cmake).

There are ports available for OpenBSD and FreeBSD, we suggest you use these for installing polybar.

Uninstalling

If you have installed polybar using a package manager, the package manager will provide the uninstall feature.

If you have manually compiled and installed polybar, go into the build folder where you originally ran make install. There you can run sudo make uninstall to remove all installed files from your system.

Warning: make uninstall will try to delete all files listed in the install_manifest.txt file inside your build folder. Make sure you first check that it won't delete any important files.

CMake Options

New in version 3.6.0

Polybar provides a bunch of cmake options to configure which and how components are compiled.

Flag Default Effect
BUILD_POLYBAR ON Builds the polybar executable
BUILD_POLYBAR_MSG ON Builds the polybar-msg executable
BUILD_TESTS OFF Builds the test suite
BUILD_DOC ON Builds the documentation
BUILD_DOC_HTML BUILD_DOC Builds the html documentation (depends on BUILD_DOC)
BUILD_DOC_MAN BUILD_DOC Builds the manpages (depends on BUILD_DOC)
BUILD_CONFIG ON Generates the default config
BUILD_SHELL ON Generates shell completion files
DISABLE_ALL OFF Disables all above targets by default. Individual targets can still be enabled explicitly
POLYBAR_FLAGS '' Pass additional flags to the compiler and linker
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