Kiwix Build

Kiwix Build provides advanced tools to (cross-)compile easily Kiwix & openZIM softwares and libraries and deploy them. They have been tested on Fedora 23+ & Ubuntu 16.10+.

Prerequisites

You will need a recent version of Meson (>= 0.34) and Ninja (>= 1.6) If your distribution provides a recent enough versions for them, just install them with your package manager. Continue to read the instructions otherwise.

Before anything else you need to install Python3 related tools. On Debian based systems:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip virtualenv

Create a virtual environment to install python module in it instead of modifying the system.

virtualenv -p python3 ./ # Create virtualenv
source bin/activate      # Activate the virtualenv

Then, download and install kiwix-build and its dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/kiwix/kiwix-build.git
cd kiwix-build
pip install .
hash -r # Refresh bash paths

Compilation

The compilation is handled by the kiwix-build command. It will compile everything. If you are using a supported platform (Redhat or Debian based) it will install missing packages using sudo. You can get kiwix-build usage like this:

kiwix-build --help

Target

You may want to compile a specific target so you will have to specify it on the

command line:

kiwix-build kiwix-lib # will build kiwix-build and its dependencies
kiwix-build kiwix-desktop # will build kiwix-desktop and its dependencies
kiwix-build zim-tools # will build zim-tools and its dependencies

By default, kiwix-build will build kiwix-tools .

To see the whole list of available targets run with non existing target, ex:

kiwix-build not-existing-target
...
invalid choice: 'not-existing-target' (choose from 'alldependencies', 'android-ndk',
...

Target platform

If no target platform is specified, a default one will be infered from the specified target:

• kiwix-lib-app will be build using the platform android
• Other targets will be build using the platform native_dyn

But you can select another target platform using the option --target-platform. For now, there is ten different supported platforms:

• native_dyn
• native_mixed
• native_static
• win32_dyn
• win32_static
• android
• android_arm
• android_arm64
• android_x86
• android_x86_64
• flatpak

So, if you want to compile kiwix-tools for win32 using static linkage:

kiwix-build --target-platform win32_dyn

Android

kiwix-android (https://github.com/kiwix/kiwix-android) depends of the kiwix-lib project. It uses a special .aar file that represent (and embed) the kiwix-lib for all supported android arch. This is a kind of fat archive we have for MacOs.

The .aar file is build using the kiwix-lib-app project. kiwix-lib-app itself is architecture independent (it is just a packaging of other archives) but it use kiwix-lib who is architecture dependent.

When building kiwix-lib, you should directly use the target-platform android_<arch>:

kiwix-build kiwix-lib --target-platform android_arm

But, kiwix-lib-app is mainly multi arch. To compile kiwix-lib-app, you must use the android platform:

$ kiwix-build --target-platform android kiwix-lib-app
$ kiwix-build kiwix-lib-app # because `android` platform is the default for `kiwix-lib-app`

By default, when using platform android, kiwix-lib will be build for all architectures. This can be changed by using the option --android-arch:

$ kiwix-build kiwix-lib-app # aar with all architectures
$ kiwix-build kiwix-lib-app --android-arch arm # aar with arm architecture
$ kiwix-build kiwix-lib-app --android-arch arm --android-arch arm64 # aan with arm and arm64 architectures

To build kiwix-android itself, you should see the documentation of kiwix-android.

iOS

When building for ios, we may want to compile a "fat library", a library for several architectures.

To do so, you should directly use the target-platfrom ios_multi. As for android, kiwix-build will build the library several times (once for each platform) and then create the fat library.

kiwix-build --target-platform iOS_multi kiwix-lib

You can specify the supported architectures with the option --ios-arch:

kiwix-build --target-platform iOS_multi kiwix-lib # all architetures
kiwix-build --target-platform iOS_multi --ios-arch arm --ios-arch arm64 # arm and arm64 arch only

Outputs

Kiwix-build.py will create several directories:

• ARCHIVES: All the downloaded archives go there.
• SOURCES: All the sources (extracted from archives and patched) go there.
• BUILD_<target_platform>: All the build files go there.
• BUILD_<target_platform>/INSTALL: The installed files go there.
• BUILD_<target_platform>/LOGS: The logs files of the build.

If you want to install all those directories elsewhere, you can pass the --working-dir option to kiwix-build:

Troubleshooting

If you need to install Meson "manually":

virtualenv -p python3 ./ # Create virtualenv
source bin/activate      # Activate the virtualenv
pip3 install meson       # Install Meson
hash -r                  # Refresh bash paths

If you need to install Ninja "manually":

wget https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases/download/v1.8.2/ninja-linux.zip
unzip ninja-linux.zip ninja -d $HOME/bin

License

GPLv3 or later, see LICENSE for more details.