1 Quassel IRC - Installation Notes
2 ================================
4 These should help you to install Quassel IRC from source. Note that this focuses
5 mostly on building on Linux; please feel free to send patches for build
6 instructions on other platforms. We are not familiar with them.
8 There are three versions of Quassel that can be built:
10 * quasselcore - The server daemon. Typically runs on a headless server and
11 is permanently online. The core connects to IRC and stores
12 both settings and backlog.
13 * quasselclient - The GUI client. Requires a running quasselcore to connect to.
14 Upon connection, the client will fetch all session data and
15 a certain amount of backlog from the core and restore its
16 session almost as if you were never gone.
17 * quassel - This standalone version, often called "monolithic" or
18 "mono client", contains both a client and a core and can be
19 used like a "normal" IRC client, without having to setup
25 Of course, for building Quassel you need the usual set of build tools, for
26 example a compiler. The codebase uses the C++14 standard, so a reasonably recent
29 - GCC 5.0+ (available for most platforms), or
30 - Clang 3.4+ (available for most platforms), or
31 - XCode 6.0+ (available for Max OS X and based on Clang), or
32 - MSVC 19+ (part of Visual Studio 2017 on Windows™)
34 Other compilers may work, but are not officially supported.
36 As Quassel is a Qt application, you need the Qt SDK, version 5.5 or higher.
37 Furthermore, the Boost header-only libraries (at least version 1.54) and
38 CMake 3.5 or later are required. CMake will tell you about any missing
39 dependencies when configuring the project.
41 Compiling Quassel - short version
42 ---------------------------------
44 Quassel uses CMake as its build system. The canonical way to build any CMake-
45 based project is as follows:
54 Compiling Quassel - long version
55 --------------------------------
57 First of all, it is highly recommended for any CMake-based project to be built
58 in a separate build directory rather than in-source. That way, your source
59 checkout remains pristine, and you can easily remove any build artifacts by just
60 deleting the build directory. This directory can be located anywhere; in the
61 short example above, we've just created a directory called "build" inside the
64 From inside the build directory, you can then run the "cmake" command, followed
65 by the path to the source. Additionally, you can append various options. Note
66 that CMake caches the options you provide on the command line, so if you rerun
67 it later in the same build directory, you don't need to specify them again.
69 Quassel supports several options to enable or disable features, and can make
70 use of several optional dependencies if installed. CMake will give a nice
71 summary of all that after its run, so we'll just mention the most important
74 -DWANT_(CORE|QTCLIENT|MONO)=(ON|OFF)
75 Choose which Quassel binaries to build.
78 Enable ccache if the ccache binary is available. This avoids the need for
79 hacks using PATH or the CXX variable to make ccache work.
80 Distributors may want to disable automatic detection if they have their
81 own caching mechanism set up.
84 Enable integration with the KDE Frameworks runtime environment
86 -DWITH_BUNDLED_ICONS=ON
87 Quassel requires a number of icons that are part of the KDE/Plasma icon themes
88 Breeze and Oxygen, but are generally not supported by other themes. In order
89 to avoid missing icons, Quassel bundles the subset of icons it uses from the
90 afforementioned themes, and uses that as a fallback if the system theme does
91 not provide a required icon.
92 If it is ensured that Breeze and/or Oxygen are installed on your system (e.g.
93 through package dependencies), this option can be turned off to save less
94 than 2 MB of disk space.
96 -DWITH_OXYGEN_ICONS=(ON|OFF)
97 Support the Oxygen icon theme. Oxygen was the default theme in KDE 4, and
98 also the bundled icon theme in Quassel before version 0.13. Since the move
99 to Qt5, the more modern Breeze icon theme is preferred, and thus Oxygen
100 is disabled by default.
103 Use WebEngine for showing previews of webpages linked in the chat. Requires
104 the QtWebEngine module to be available, and increases the client's RAM usage
105 by *a lot* if enabled at runtime. The default is ON.
108 Use WebKit for showing previews of webpages linked in the chat. Requires
109 the QtWebKit module to be available, and increases the client's RAM usage
110 by *a lot* if enabled at runtime.
111 Note that WebKit support is deprecated and mostly unmaintained in Qt, and
112 should no longer be used for security reasons. The default is OFF.
114 -DEMBED_DATA=(ON|OFF)
115 Specifies whether Quassel's data files (icons, translations and so on)
116 should be installed normally, or embedded into the binaries. The latter is
117 useful if you want to run Quassel from the build directory, or don't want
118 to use a standard installation. In particular, EMBED_DATA defaults to ON
119 on Windows and OS X, and to OFF on Linux.
121 You can find the list of optional packages for additional features in CMake's
122 feature summary; install missing packages for enabling the functionality listed
123 in the explanation. If you want to forcefully disable an optional feature, use
124 -DCMAKE_DISABLE_FIND_PACKAGE_Foo=TRUE, where "Foo" is the package name listed.
126 Quassel also supports the usual CMake options, most importantly
128 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/prefix/path - specify the installation prefix
129 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=(Debug|Release|RelWithDebug) - specify the build type
131 If you want to narrow down the languages to be installed, you can set the
132 LINGUAS environment variable with a space-separated list of language codes,
133 for example LINGUAS="de en_US".
135 After running CMake, you can just run "make" in the build directory, and
136 "make install" for installing the result into the installation prefix.