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. As we use a subset of the C++11 standard, we require a
27 fairly recent compiler:
29 - gcc 4.8+ (available for most platforms), or
30 - Clang 3.3+ (available for most platforms), or
31 - XCode 5.0+ (available for Max OS X and based on Clang), or
32 - Visual C++ 2015 (available for Windows™), or
33 - any other compiler with decent C++11 support
35 Furthermore, CMake 2.8.9 or later is required (2.8.12 for KDE Frameworks).
37 As Quassel is a Qt application, you need the Qt SDK, either Qt 4.8+ or Qt 5.2+.
39 There are several optional dependencies; we will talk about that later.
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 Allow to choose which Quassel binaries to build.
78 Build against Qt5 instead of the default Qt4. Note that you should empty
79 your build directory when switching between Qt versions, otherwise weird
83 Enable integration into KDE4 (with Qt4) or KDE Frameworks (with Qt5).
85 -DWITH_BREEZE=(ON|OFF)
86 Install the parts of the Breeze icon theme Quassel uses. Breeze is the default
87 icon theme for Plasma 5, and thus already available on systems where Plasma is
88 installed. By default, WITH_BREEZE is ON iff WITH_KDE is OFF. If you are
89 sure that you have the icon set already installed on your system regardless,
90 use this option to disable installing the bundled icons.
92 -DWITH_BREEZE_DARK=(ON|OFF)
93 Alternative icon theme to Breeze, optimized for dark desktop themes.
94 By default, WITH_BREEZE_DARK is OFF.
96 -DWITH_OXYGEN=(ON|OFF)
97 Alternative icon theme to Breeze. Oxygen was the default theme in KDE 4, and
98 also the bundled icon theme in Quassel before version 0.13.
99 By default, WITH_OXYGEN is OFF.
102 Use Webkit for showing previews of webpages linked in the chat. Requires
103 the QtWebkit module to be available, and increases the client's RAM usage
104 by *a lot* if enabled at runtime. Note also that Webkit frequently crashes
105 especially on Windows.
107 -DEMBED_DATA=(ON|OFF)
108 Specifies whether Quassel's data files (icons, translations and so on)
109 should be installed normally, or embedded into the binaries. The latter is
110 useful if you want to run Quassel from the build directory, or don't want
111 to use a standard installation. In particular, EMBED_DATA defaults to ON
112 on Windows and OS X, and to OFF on Linux.
114 You can find the list of optional packages for additional features in CMake's
115 feature summary; install missing packages for enabling the functionality listed
116 in the explanation. If you want to forcefully disable an optional feature, use
117 -DCMAKE_DISABLE_FIND_PACKAGE_Foo=TRUE, where "Foo" is the package name listed.
119 Quassel also supports the usual CMake options, most importantly
121 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/prefix/path - specify the installation prefix
122 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=(Debug|Release|RelWithDebug) - specify the build type
124 If you want to narrow down the languages to be installed, you can set the
125 LINGUAS environment variable with a space-separated list of language codes,
126 for example LINGUAS="de en_US".
128 After running CMake, you can just run "make" in the build directory, and
129 "make install" for installing the result into the installation prefix.