ZIM library

The ZIM library is the reference implementation for the ZIM file format. It's a solution to read and write ZIM files on many systems and architectures. More information about the ZIM format and the openZIM project at http://www.openzim.org/

Disclaimer

This document assumes you have a little knowledge about software compilation. If you experience difficulties with the dependencies or with the ZIM libary compilation itself, we recommend to have a look to kiwix-build.

Preamble

Although the ZIM library can be compiled/cross-compiled on/for many sytems, the following documentation explains how to do it on POSIX ones. It is primarly though for GNU/Linux systems and has been tested on recent releases of Ubuntu and Fedora.

Dependencies

The Kiwix library relies on many third parts software libraries. They are prerequisites to the Kiwix library compilation. Following libraries need to be available:

Z ................................................. http://zlib.net/ (package zlib1g-dev on Ubuntu)
Lzma ...................................... http://tukaani.org/lzma/ (package lzma-dev on Ubuntu)
ICU ................................... http://site.icu-project.org/ (package libicu-dev on Ubuntu)
Xapian (optional) .............................. https://xapian.org/ (package libxapian-dev on Ubuntu)
Google test (optional) ........ https://github.com/google/googletest (No valid package on Ubuntu, if gtest is not present, libzim will use embedded one)

These dependencies may or may not be packaged by your operating system. They may also be packaged but only in an older version. The compilation script will tell you if one of them is missing or too old. In the worse case, you will have to download and compile a more recent version by hand.

If you want to install these dependencies locally, then ensure that meson (through pkg-config) will properly find them.

Environnement

The ZIM library builds using Meson version 0.39 or higher. Meson relies itself on Ninja, pkg-config and few other compilation tools.

Install first the few common compilation tools:

Automake
Libtool
Virtualenv
Pkg-config

Then install Meson itself:

virtualenv -p python3 ./ # Create virtualenv
source bin/activate      # Activate the virtualenv
pip3 install meson       # Install Meson
hash -r                  # Refresh bash paths

Finally we need the Ninja tool (available in the $PATH). Here is a solution to download, build and install it locally:

git clone git://github.com/ninja-build/ninja.git
cd ninja
git checkout release
./configure.py --bootstrap
mkdir ../bin
cp ninja ../bin
cd ..

Compilation

Once all dependencies are installed, you can compile ZIM library with:

mkdir build
meson . build
cd build
ninja

By default, it will compile dynamic linked libraries. If you want statically linked libraries, you can add --default-library=static option to the Meson command.

Depending of you system, ninja may be called ninja-build.

Installation

If you want to install the libzim and the headers you just have compiled on your system, here we go:

ninja install # You have to be in the "build" directory

You might need to run the command as root (or using 'sudo'), depending where you want to install the libraries. After the installation succeeded, you may need to run ldconfig (as root).

Uninstallation

If you want to uninstall the libzim:

ninja uninstall # You have to be in the "build" directory

Like for the installation, you might need to run the command as root (or using 'sudo').

Troubleshooting

If the compilation fails, you might need to get a more recent version of a dependency than the one packaged by your Linux distribution. Try then with a source tarball distributed by the problematic upstream project or even directly from the source code repository.

License

GPLv2 or later, see COPYING for more details.

jasco / libzim