Build

Once you have downloaded the source code, you can build Pragtical using Meson. In addition, the build-packages.sh script can be used to compile Pragtical and create an OS-specific package for Linux, Windows or macOS.

Dependencies

The following libraries are required:

• LuaJIT or Lua 5.4
• SDL2
• freetype2
• pcre2
• uchardet

If they are not installed on your system you can force meson to download and build them for you by using the following flag --wrap-mode=forcefallback. Otherwise, if they are present, they will be used to compile Pragtical.

Lua Meson subproject is preferred over currently installed system Lua.

Due to the discrepancies of the Lua version shipped by the various Linux distributions, we adapted the build system to make use of the Meson Lua subproject by default to prevent incompatibility issues.

If you are sure the Lua version installed on your system is compatible use the setup flag: -Duse_system_lua=true

Building with Meson

To build Pragtical with Meson the commands below can be used:

meson setup --buildtype=release --prefix <prefix> build
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build --skip-subprojects="freetype2,pcre2" --dest-dir ../pragtical

where <prefix> depends on the OS you are using:

• on Linux is /usr
• on macOS application bundle can be "/Pragtical.app"
• on Windows you don't need to use this flag

If you are using a version of Meson below 0.54 you need to use different commands to compile and install:

meson setup --buildtype=release build
ninja -C build
ninja -C build install

Building with Helper Script

The build-packages.sh automates some of the steps required to setup your environment, for usage instructions execute:

bash build-packages.sh -h

The script will run Meson and create an archive with the application. Pragtical can be easily installed by unpacking the archive in any directory of your choice.

On Windows two packages will be created, one called "portable" using the "data" folder next to the executable and the other one using a Unix-like file layout. The portable version conforms to the directory structure of normal Windows programs while the Unix-like file layout is meant for a Unix-like environment.

Pragtical does not hard-code any directories and instead relies on environment variables. This allows the package to be run in any directory.

Portable Mode

When running meson setup you may specify -Dportable=true to install Pragtical as a portable application.

Pragtical needs the data directory to run properly. When portable is enabled, Pragtical will use the data directory placed next to the executable. Otherwise, Pragtical will use Unix-like directory locations. It will use $prefix/share/pragtical for data and the executable will be located in $prefix/bin. $prefix is determined when the application starts such that $prefix/bin corresponds to the location of the executable.

The user directory does not depend on the portable option and will always be $HOME/.config/pragtical. On Windows, $USERPROFILE will be used instead of $HOME.

Meson Build Flags

To know all the available build flags please consult the meson_options.txt file. For reference here are the available ones at time of writing that you can define at the setup stage with -D<flag_name>=<value>:

Flag	Type	Default	Description
bundle	boolean	false	Build a macOS bundle
source-only	boolean	false	Configure source files only, doesn't checks for dependencies
portable	boolean	false	Portable install
renderer	boolean	false	Use SDL renderer
dirmonitor_backend	combo	'' (auto-detect)	Define what dirmonitor backend to use: 'inotify', 'fsevents', 'kqueue', 'win32', 'dummy'
arch_tuple	string	''	Specify a custom architecture tuple
use_system_lua	boolean	false	Prefer System Lua over the meson wrap
extra_colors	boolean	true	Include additional colors
extra_languages	boolean	true	Include additional language plugins
ppm	boolean	true	Include the plugin manager
jit	boolean	true	Use luajit

Environment Setup

Some of the steps that may be required depending on your Operating System if you decide against using the --wrap-mode=forcefallback flag.

Linux

On Debian-based systems the required libraries and Meson can be installed using the following commands:

# To install the required libraries:
sudo apt install libfreetype6-dev libsdl2-dev libpcre2-dev libuchardet-dev

# To install Meson:
sudo apt install meson
# or pip3 install --user meson

macOS

On macOS you can install a package manager such as brew to install all the required dependencies.

brew intall meson freetype sdl2 pcre2 uchardet

Otherwise you can skip this and just use the already mentioned --wrap-mode=forcefallback flag.

Windows MSYS2

The build environment chosen for Pragtical on Windows is MSYS2. Follow the installation instructions in the link.

• Open MinGW 64-bit or MinGW 32-bit shell from the start menu.
• Update the MSYS2 installation with pacman -Syu
• Restart the shell
• Install the dependencies:

pacman -S \
  ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-freetype \
  ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-gcc \
  ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-ninja \
  ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-pcre2 \
  ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-pkg-config \
  ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-python-pip \
  ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-SDL2 \
  ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-uchardet \
pip3 install meson

${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX} expands either to mingw-w64-i686 or mingw-w64-x86_64 depending on the current MSYS2 shell used.