Table of Contents

1 Compiling and installing on Unix

1.1 Downloading

Even numbered versions are `stable' (2.0, 1.8 etc), while odd version are development releases (2.1, 1.9, etc). Building LilyPond is an involved process, so if possible, download a precompiled binary from the lilypond site.

1.1.1 Source code

Download source tarballs from here:

Use Xdelta to patch tarballs, e.g. to patch lilypond-1.4.2.tar.gz to lilypond-1.4.3.tar.gz, do

     	xdelta patch lilypond-1.4.2-1.4.3.xd lilypond-1.4.2.tar.gz

For information on packaging and CVS, see http://lilypond.org/, under “development”.

1.1.2 Precompiled binaries

Check out http://lilypond.org for up to date information on binary packages.

1.1.3 Font problems

If you are upgrading from a previous version of LilyPond, be sure to remove all old font files. These include .pk and .tfm files that may be located in /var/lib/texmf, /var/spool/texmf, /var/tmp/texmf or prefix/share/lilypond/fonts/. A script automating this has been included, see buildscripts/clean-fonts.sh.

1.2 Requirements

1.2.1 Compilation

You need the following packages to compile LilyPond:

1.2.2 Running requirements

GNU LilyPond does use a lot of resources. For operation you need the following software:

You have to help TeX and MetaFont find LilyPond support files. After compiling, scripts to do this can be found in buildscripts/out/lilypond-profile and buildscripts/out/lilypond-login.

1.2.3 Building documentation

You can view the documentation online at http://www.lilypond.org/doc/, but you can also build it locally. This process requires a successful compile of lilypond. The documentation is built by issuing:

     	make web

Building the website requires some additional tools:

The HTML files can be installed into the standard documentation path by issuing

             make out=www web-install

1.3 Building LilyPond

To install GNU LilyPond, type

     gunzip -c lilypond-x.y.z | tar xf -
     cd lilypond-x.y.z
     ./configure		# run with --help to see appropriate options
     make
     make install
     sh buildscripts/clean-fonts.sh

The most time-consuming part of compiling LilyPond is tracing the Type1 fonts. You can shortcut this operation by issuing one of the following commands:

       make -C mf get-pfa                # requires rpm2cpio
       make -C mf get-debian-pfa         # may not be up to date

If you are doing an upgrade, you should remove all feta .pk and .tfm files. A script has been provided to do the work for you, see buildscripts/clean-fonts.sh.

If you are not root, you should choose a --prefix argument that points into your home directory, e.g.:

     	./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr

In this case, you have to insert the contents of buildscripts/out/lilypond-login or buildscripts/out/lilypond-profile into your start up scripts by hand.

1.3.1 Configuring for multiple platforms

If you want to build multiple versions of LilyPond with different configuration settings, you can use the --enable-config=CONF option of configure. You should use make conf=CONF to generate the output in out-CONF. Example: Suppose I want to build with and without profiling. Then I'd use the following for the normal build:

     	./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr/ --enable-checking
     	make
     	make install

and for the profiling version, I specify a different configuration:

     	./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr/ --enable-profiling --enable-config=prof --disable-checking
     	make conf=prof
     	make conf=prof install

1.4 Emacs mode

An Emacs mode for entering music and running LilyPond is contained in the source archive in the elisp directory. make install installs it elispdir. The file lilypond-init.el should be placed to load-path/site-start.d/ or appended to your ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.el.

As a user, you may want add your source path or, e.g., ~/site-lisp/ to your load-path. Append the following line (modified) to your ~/.emacs:

          (setq load-path (append (list (expand-file-name "~/site-lisp")) load-path))
     

1.5 Vim mode

A Vim mode for entering music and running LilyPond is contained in the source archive. For version 6.2 and newer, Vim-mode works directly after installing LilyPond. Otherwise, complete the following two steps.

For earlier versions (and if $VIM environment variable does not fall-back to /usr/local/share/vim, see :version in vim), the LilyPond file type is detected if your file ~/.vim/filetype.vim has the following content:

     	if exists("did_load_filetypes")
       	  finish
     	endif
     	augroup filetypedetect
       	  au! BufNewFile,BufRead *.ly           setf lilypond
     	augroup END

If Vim has been (pre-)installed to /usr/... (or any other place) instead of /usr/local/..., then /usr/local/share/vim may not be specified in your $VIMRUNTIME environment variable and you have to include this path explicitly by appending the following line to your ~/.vimrc:

     	set runtimepath+=/usr/local/share/vim/

1.6 Problems

For help and questions use lilypond-user@gnu.org. Send bug reports to bug-lilypond@gnu.org.

Bugs that are not fault of LilyPond are documented here.

1.6.1 Bison 1.875

There is a bug in bison-1.875: compilation fails with "parse error before `goto'" in line 4922 due to a bug in bison. To fix, either recompile bison 1.875 with the following fix:

        $ cd lily; make out/parser.cc
        $ vi +4919 out/parser.cc
        # append a semicolon to the line containing "__attribute__ ((__unused__))
        # save
        $ make

1.6.2 Linking to kpathsea

If kpathsea and the corresponding header files are installed in some directory where GCC does not search by default, for example in /usr/local/lib/ and /usr/local/include/ respectively, you have to explicitly tell configure where to find it. To do this:

Once configure has found them, the paths are stored in config.make and will be used even if you don't have the environment variables set during make.

Gcc-3.0.4

Gcc 3.0.4 is flaky; upgrade GCC.

Flex-2.5.4a and gcc-3.x

Flex 2.5.4a does not produce g++-3.1.1 compliant C++ code. To compile LilyPond with gcc-3.1.1 you may do

     	CONF=gcc-3.1 ./lexer-gcc-3.1.sh
     	CPPFLAGS=-I$(pwd)/lily/out-gcc-3.1 CC=gcc-3.1 CXX=g++-3.1 \
     	    ./configure --enable-config=gcc-3.1
     	CONF=gcc-3.1 ./lexer-gcc-3.1.sh
     	make conf=gcc-3.1

OpenBSD

NetBSD

Solaris

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This page is for LilyPond-2.2.6 (stable-branch).

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