Development Setup

This page is intended as a guide for those who wish to build the HEAD of Sway and wlroots for testing or development purposes. If you are an end-user, this page isn't relevant to you.

Dependencies

You're going to need the following tools to get started:

• git
• gcc
• meson
• ninja

You'll also need the dependencies, which you can find in the README. Avoid package bundles on distributions other than Arch Linux, as they are usually outdated.

Arch Linux (easiest)

The Arch User Repository (AUR) has the convenient sway-git and wlroots-git package bundles, which contain everything you'll need to compile their respective projects. Use your preferred AUR helper to install these.

Fedora

Fedora requires installing all of the dependencies one-by-one. --releasever=29 is required as dependencies for versions below 29 are outdated.

dnf install -y --releasever=29 git gcc meson ninja-build wayland-devel wayland-protocols-devel libinput-devel cairo-devel libpcap-devel json-c-devel pam-devel pango-devel pcre-devel gdk-pixbuf2-devel pixman-devel mesa-libEGL-devel mesa-libGLES-devel mesa-libgbm-devel libxkbcommon-devel libudev-devel mesa-dri-drivers

Debian

On Debian-based distributions, library packages are commonly suffixed by -dev.

Variables

If you don't want to add the paths below to your ~/.profile, you can paste these lines into your terminal to set the variables for the current terminal session only.

Ensure that /usr/local/bin is in your PATH by executing echo $PATH. If it isn't, open ~/.profile and add:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Ensure that your PKG_CONFIG_PATH contains /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig and /usr/local/lib64/pkgconfig by executing echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH. If it doesn't, open ~/.profile and add:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib64/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

Ensure that your LD_LIBRARY_PATH contains /usr/local/lib/ and /usr/local/lib64/ by executing echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. If it doesn't, open the ~/.profile file located in your home directory and add:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib64/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Execute source ~/.profile to update the variables for your current terminal session. You should ensure that your chosen shell sources ~/.profile on login (you may need to delete ~/.bash_profile for it to take precedent).

Compiling

You're now ready to compile wlroots, which is the Wayland compositor library used by Sway.

• Clone the wlroots repository with git
• Execute meson build, which will create the build directory
• Execute ninja -C build to build
• Execute sudo ninja -C build install to install
• Verify that either /usr/local/lib or /usr/local/lib64 contain libwlroots.so

Now that wlroots is built and installed, you can build Sway.

• Clone the Sway repository with git
• Execute meson build, which will create the build directory
• Execute ninja -C build to build
• Execute sudo ninja -C build install to install
• Verify that /usr/local/bin contains the sway, swaybar, swaylock, etc. binaries

Since Sway and wlroots development moves quite fast, it's common to have issues compiling Sway if your installed version of wlroots is behind. As a first step of compile error troubleshooting, pull, build, and reinstall wlroots.