Skip to content

Build from source

The Release-* and PR-check-* workflow files under .github in the source code has actual build and commands for reference.

Dependencies

  • C++17 compiler (For windows it must be MSVC)
  • Latest QT6

For Debian/Ubuntu, those packages are needed:

sudo apt-get install build-essential ninja-build \
libvorbis-dev zlib1g-dev libhunspell-dev x11proto-record-dev \
libxtst-dev liblzo2-dev libbz2-dev libavutil-dev libavformat-dev \
libeb16-dev libzstd-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxapian-dev libzim-dev \
libopencc-dev qt6-5compat-dev qt6-base-dev qt6-multimedia-dev \
qt6-speech-dev qt6-svg-dev qt6-tools-dev qt6-tools-dev-tools \
qt6-webchannel-dev qt6-webengine-dev

In other words, those libraries

  • ffmpeg
  • libzim
  • xapian
  • hunspell
  • opencc
  • libeb
  • libvorbis
  • x11 (linux only)

And a few compression libraries:

  • xz (lzma)
  • bzip2
  • lzo2
  • zlib

Build

Basically, you need those commands:

cd goldendict-ng && mkdir build_dir
# config step
cmake -S . -B build_dir
      -G "Ninja"/"Unix Makefiles"/"Xcode"...  (Optional)
      --install-prefix=/usr/local/            (Optional)
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release              (Optional)

# actual build
cmake --build build_dir
      --parallel 7  (Optional if Ninja was chosen)

cmake --install ./build_dir/

Feature flags

Append -D{flag_names}=ON/OFF to cmake's config step.

Available flags can be found on the top of CMakeLists.txt

Windows

Install Qt6 (MSVC) through Qt Online Installer and add Qt's path to CMake

-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=F:\Qt\6.4.1\msvc2019_64

Make the .exe runable

Call cmake --install {the cmake output folder} will copy all necessary dependencies to correct locations.

TODO: (untested) you can also ${Qt's install path}\Qt\6.5.2\msvc2019_64\bin and vcpkg's bin paths to your PATH environment variable

Note that using -G Ninja in CMake is assumed to be used. TODO: MSBuild has minor bugs for being "Multi-Config".

Vcpkg

vcpkg is the primary method to build GoldenDict-ng's dependencies.

There are a few ways to use it.

First, just do nothing. Without any additional CMake config options, a pre-built cached version of vcpkg will be automatically obtained and setup.

Second, install vcpkg on your local machine, then set CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE as described here, which says append -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE={Your vcpkg install location}/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake to CMake's config step. Note that this costs a long time to build.

macOS

If you build in an IDE, then the created GoldenDict.app will be runnable from the IDE which set up necessary magics for you.

To make the .app runnable elsewhere, you can run cmake --install build_dir/ which will invoke macdeployqt, ad-hoc code signing and various other things. The produced app will end up in build_dir/redist/goldendict-ng.app

To create .dmg installer, you have to have create-dmg installed on your machine, then also cmake --install build_dir/.