The software industry has undergone many changes in its short history. So, until recently, the development and distribution of open source software was considered the lot of enthusiasts. Today, many corporations are building their businesses on the basis of Open Source. There is more and more software in the world that is distributed in the form of source code, and free of charge. Many users prefer this kind of software to solutions "out of the box", since it is not so difficult to install programs from source.
Necessary
Administrator rights on the local machine. Skills of reading technical documentation. Compiler. Optional: Internet access to download additional programs, libraries
Instructions
Step 1
Check out the documentation for building and installing the software. Typically, short instructions are provided in the readme.txt or readme.html files located at the root of the source tree. These files usually contain links to detailed instructions, if any. The description of the build and installation process may contain a list of requirements for the operating environment. For example, building a project may require specific libraries or frameworks. Compiler requirements may also be specified here.
Step 2
Download and install additional software. If necessary, download and install the missing components required to build the application from source. For example, when building applications on operating systems of the Linux family, the autotools package and the gcc compiler of a certain version may be required.
Step 3
Configure the project. Configuration options are usually provided in the accompanying documentation. The project may include configuration scripts such as configure. Also, the configuration can be done by changing the values of the constants in the configuration files.
Step 4
Build the project. See the documentation for the exact instructions on how to initialize the build process. As a rule, it is enough to execute just one command to start it. On Linux-like systems, building projects is usually done with a tool like make, using directive files called makefile. Therefore, to start building, it is enough to run the make command in the project directory. When building under windows, additional scripts or batch files can be used. However, there are often versions of assembly files for compilers such as nmake in the project directories, and the assembly can be performed by running the compiler with a similar file as a command line parameter.
Step 5
Install software built from source. Install according to the instructions in the documentation. On Linux systems, to install the project build results, as a rule, it is enough to execute the "make install" command. When building under Windows, a separate batch file can be used for installation.
