Building from source#

In this guide we will walk through the configuration of development environment: installation of necessary tools and packagase and configuring builds.

Obtaining source code#

The source code of the project is served on GitHub, and could be retrieved in the following way:

$ git clone https://github.com/ybubnov/metalchat
$ cd metalchat

Creating an environment#

The building of the library and tests is implemented using a conan to resolve C++ dependencies, and CMake plus ninja as a build system.

These building instruments are installed by the conan itself, and therefore do not require manual installation. The primary way of building the framework is using the Python environment. You can configure the Python environment in the following steps:

  1. Install development tools:

$ brew install pipenv ninja cmake

  1. Install project dependencies:

$ pipenv sync --dev

  1. Enter pipenv-shell:

$ pipenv shell

Configuring a development build#

On the next step you need to setup conan profile, usually a default conan profile would work without modifications to compile a library on MacOS, nevertheless here we present an example profile (let’s call it metalchat-debug). In the highlighted line we explicitly state that we need a C++ compiler with 23 standard support.

~/.conan2/profiles/metalchat-debug#
[settings]
arch=armv8
build_type=Debug
compiler=apple-clang
compiler.cppstd=gnu23
compiler.libcxx=libc++
compiler.version=17
os=Macos

Building binaries#

After that you could use this profile to install missing C++ dependencies and create a build environment. Run this command from the project directory root (it will create build directory):

$ conan build --build=missing --profile:host=metalchat-debug

Optionally, you could build a framework without running tests:

$ conan build --build=missing --profile:host=metalchat-debug -c tools.build:skip_test=True

Conan builds both, a framework and executable command-line program. The build of the program could be disable using conan package option build_executable:

$ conan build --build=missing --profile:host=metalchat-build -o build_executable=False

Building a conan package#

MetalChat could be used as a conan dependency, for this purpose you could build a conan package in the following way:

$ conan export-pkg