These instructions are intended to build the emulator in Linux and macOS. Windows users are suggested to develop in a Linux VM or using the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
If you only want to work with Lua frontend stuff, you can grab the AppImage and
run it with --appimage-extract
.
You can skip most of the following instructions if desired, and use our premade Docker image instead. In that case the only requirements are Git and Docker. See the virtual development environment README for more information.
Note: If you want to use WSL then you'll need to export a sane PATH first, because Windows appends its own directories to it. You'll also need to install an XServer. If you need more info please read koreader#6354.
To get and compile the source you must have patch
, wget
, unzip
, git
,
cmake
and luarocks
installed, as well as a version of autoconf
greater than 2.64. You also need nasm
, ragel
, and of course a compiler like gcc
or clang
.
Install the prerequisites using APT:
sudo apt-get install build-essential git patch wget unzip \
gettext autoconf automake cmake libtool libtool-bin nasm ragel luarocks lua5.1 libsdl2-dev \
libssl-dev libffi-dev libc6-dev-i386 xutils-dev linux-libc-dev:i386 zlib1g:i386
Install the prerequisites using DNF:
sudo dnf install libstdc++-static SDL SDL-devel patch wget unzip git cmake luarocks autoconf nasm ragel gcc
Install the prerequisites using Homebrew:
brew install nasm ragel binutils coreutils libtool autoconf automake cmake makedepend \
sdl2 [email protected] luarocks gettext pkg-config wget gnu-getopt grep bison
You will also have to ensure Homebrew's gettext, gnu-getopt, bison & grep are in your path, e.g., via
export PATH="$(brew --prefix)/opt/gettext/bin:$(brew --prefix)/opt/gnu-getopt/bin:$(brew --prefix)/opt/bison/bin:$(brew --prefix)/opt/grep/libexec/gnubin:${PATH}"
See also brew info gettext
for details on how to make that permanent in your shell.
In the same vein, if that's not already the case, you probably also want to make sure Homebrew's stuff takes precedence:
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:${PATH/:\/usr\/local\/bin/}"
Note: With current XCode versions, you will need to set a minimum deployment version higher than 10.04
. Otherwise, you'll hit various linking errors related to missing unwinding libraries/symbols.
On Mojave, 10.09
has been known to behave with XCode 10, And 10.14
with XCode 11. When in doubt, go with your current macOS version.
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.09
Note: On Catalina (10.15), you will currently NOT want to deploy for 10.15
, as XCode is currently broken in that configuration! (i.e., deploy for 10.14
instead).
git clone https://github.com/koreader/koreader.git
cd koreader && ./kodev fetch-thirdparty
Building the emulator
To build an emulator on your Linux or macOS machine:
./kodev build
To run KOReader on your development machine:
./kodev run
Note: On macOS and possibly other non-Linux hosts, you might want to pass --no-build
to prevent re-running the buildsystem, as incremental builds may not behave properly.
You can specify the size and DPI of the emulator's screen using
-w=X
(width), -h=X
(height), and -d=X
(DPI).
There is also a convenience
-s
(simulate) flag with some presets like kobo-aura-one
, kindle3
, and
hidpi
. The latter is a fictional device with --screen_width=1500
,
--screen_height=2000
and --screen_dpi=600
to help ensure DPI scaling works correctly.
Sample usage:
./kodev run -s=kobo-aura-one
To use your own koreader-base repo instead of the default one change the KOR_BASE
environment variable:
make KOR_BASE=../koreader-base
This will be handy if you are developing koreader-base
and you want to test your
modifications with the KOReader frontend. NOTE: this only supports relative path for now.
Once you have the emulator ready to rock you can build for other platforms too.
You may need to check out the circleci config file to setup up a proper testing environment.
Briefly, you need to install luarocks
and then install busted
and ansicolors
with luarocks
. The "eng" language data file for tesseract-ocr is also need to test OCR functionality. Finally, make sure that luajit
in your system is at least of version 2.0.2.
To automatically set up a number of primarily luarocks-related environment variables:
./kodev activate
To run unit tests:
./kodev test base
./kodev test front
To run a specific unit test (for test development):
./kodev test front readerbookmark_spec.lua
To run Lua static analysis:
make static-check
NOTE: Extra dependencies for tests: luacheck
from luarocks.
Please refer to l10n's README to grab the latest translations from the KOReader project on Weblate with this command:
make po
If your language is not listed on the Weblate project, please don't hesitate to send a language request here.
Some strings contain variables that should remain unaltered in translation. These take the form of a %
followed by a number from 1-99
, although you'll seldom see more than about 5 in practice. Please don't put any spaces between the %
and its number. %1
should always remain %1
.
For example:
The title of the book is %1 and its author is %2.
This might be displayed as:
The title of the book is The Republic and its author is Plato.
To aid localization the variables may be freely positioned:
De auteur van het boek is %2 en de titel is %1.
That would result in:
De auteur van het boek is Plato en de titel is The Republic.
Ccache can speed up recompilation by caching previous compilations and detecting when the same compilation is being repeated. In other words, it will decrease build time when the sources have been built before. Ccache support has been added to KOReader's build system. To install ccache:
- in Ubuntu use:
sudo apt-get install ccache
- in Fedora use:
sudo dnf install ccache
- from source:
- download the latest ccache source from http://ccache.samba.org/download.html
- extract the source package in a directory
cd
to that directory and use:./configure && make && sudo make install
- to disable ccache, use
export USE_NO_CCACHE=1
before make. - for more information about ccache, visit: https://ccache.samba.org/