Tutorial:Compiling & Installing SWORD

Aims

This page is intended to help anyone who needs to get started obtaining and compiling the very latest SWORD source code, and then installing and testing it on their machine, on a Linux (or possibly other Unix-like) operating system.

For Windows users, refer to Tutorial:Compiling & Installing SWORD on Windows.

NOTE: This process includes making Internet connections to crosswire.org, to download SWORD source code and a sample SWORD module.

Introduction

There are four main steps involved:

• Installing all the necessary software packages
• Downloading the latest development SWORD source code
• Compiling and installing SWORD
• Testing that the new SWORD installation is basically working

All of these can be scripted for a specific Linux distribution, and some sample scripts are provided below. An explanation of each step is also provided, in case you want to understand what the script does (!), or there is no script for your particular Linux distribution.

Scripts for some Linux distributions

The bash scripts below use sudo to become root when necessary, see below for more details on that.

Debian or Ubuntu

Note that official SWORD packages exist, please only use this script if you truly need to compile from source, and do NOT have the packaged version of SWORD installed.

#!/bin/bash                                                                                                                 
PKGS="subversion build-essential autotools-dev pkg-config libz-dev libclucene-dev libicu-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev"
sudo apt-get install $PKGS -y
svn co http://crosswire.org/svn/sword/trunk sword
cd sword
./autogen.sh && ./usrinst.sh --enable-shared && make && sudo make install && sudo make install_config

Fedora 10 or Fedora 11

Note that official SWORD packages exist, please only use this script if you truly need to compile from source, and do NOT have the packaged version of SWORD installed.

#!/bin/bash
PKGS="subversion gcc-c++ make libtool icu zlib-devel clucene-core-devel libicu-devel libcurl-devel"
sudo yum install $PKGS -y
svn co http://crosswire.org/svn/sword/trunk sword
cd sword
./autogen.sh && ./usrinst.sh --enable-shared && make && sudo make install && sudo make install_config

Mandriva

#!/bin/bash
PKGS="colorsvn gcc-c++ make libtool icu zlib1-devel libclucene-devel libicu-devel libcurl-devel automake"
sudo urpmi $PKGS
svn co http://crosswire.org/svn/sword/trunk sword
cd sword
./autogen.sh && ./usrinst.sh --enable-shared && make && sudo make install && sudo make install_config

Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS

Official Packages now exist. Please use these if possible.

Note this script is a little more complex than most, because RHEL 5.x and CentOS 5.x lack the cluccene-core-devel library package. This means the script must manually download a source RPM package, rebuild it and install it, before it can work with the SWORD source code. And before it can do that, it has to make sure there is an appropriate setup for building RPMs from source in place.

#!/bin/bash
PKGS="subversion gcc-c++ make libtool icu zlib-devel libicu-devel libcurl-devel findutils rpm-build"
sudo yum install $PKGS -y
if [ ! -f ~/.rpmmacros ]; then
  cat >>~/.rpmmacros <<EOF
%_topdir        ~/rpm
%_tmppath       %{_topdir}/tmp
EOF
  mkdir -p ~/rpm/{BUILD,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS,tmp} ~/rpm/RPMS/{athlon,i386,i486,i586,i686,noarch}
fi
rpmbuild --rebuild http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/source/SRPMS/clucene-0.9.21-1.fc10.src.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh `find ~/rpm/RPMS/ -type f -name "*clucene*rpm" ! -name "*-debuginfo*"`
svn co http://crosswire.org/svn/sword/trunk sword
cd sword
./autogen.sh && ./usrinst.sh --enable-shared && make && sudo make install && sudo make install_config

Test script

The is a very basic test; in particular it does not check indexed search functions at all.

#!/bin/bash
export SWORD_PATH=~/.sword
mkdir -p $SWORD_PATH/mods.d
echo yes |installmgr -init
echo yes |installmgr -sc
echo yes |installmgr -r CrossWire
echo yes |installmgr -ri CrossWire KJV
unset SWORD_PATH
installmgr -l
diatheke -b KJV -k Jn 3:16

This test script should output (after a lot of debugging information):

John 3:16: 
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

(KJV)

Installing necessary software packages

Starting from a fairly minimal Linux installation, a C++ compiler and several other libraries and tools must be added to the system before compiling SWORD. These come in packages. The command to install packages varies between different Linux distributions. A few examples follow:

Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS

sudo yum install <list of packages>

Debian, Ubuntu, Mint

sudo apt-get install <list of packages>

Mandriva

sudo urpmi <list of packages>

These packaging tools will automatically install additional dependent packages, so the ones you request will work once installed.

Package names vary too, but generally the following packages must be installed:

• subversion (a tool used to obtain the latest SWORD source code, see below)
• the GNU C++ compiler, often in a package named g++ or gcc-c++
• make
• libtool
• icu
• zlib-devel (sometimes named zlib1-devel or zlib1g-dev)
• clucene-core-devel (sometimes named libclucene-dev)
• libicu-devel (sometimes named libicu-dev)
• libcurl-devel (named libcurl4-gnutls-dev on Debian-derived systems)

These will generally automatically "pull in" other necessary packages such as binutils, automake and autoconf as dependencies.

Downloading the SWORD source code

The single command

svn co http://crosswire.org/svn/sword/trunk sword

will download the current development code of SWORD, into a directory called sword. Once the command finishes, you should be able to do

cd sword

and look at all the source code you just downloaded.

Compiling and installing SWORD

The INSTALL file contains all the details, but if all is well, after cd sword (i.e., from inside the SWORD source code directory) the command line

./autogen.sh && ./usrinst.sh --enable-shared && make

to configure and compile SWORD.

If this fails, make sure all the necessary packages are installed on your system, and after that, please ask for help in the Crosswire forums or on the sword-devel mailing list.

To install SWORD, after successfully compiling SWORD, you can do

sudo make install && sudo make install_config

to install SWORD and a default configuration file on your machine.

Testing a new SWORD installation

As a very basic test, you can download and install the KJV SWORD "module" and then check that the command line bible reader diatheke can read a verse from it. The commands to do this (using the usual bash shell) are:

export SWORD_PATH=~/.sword
mkdir -p $SWORD_PATH/mods.d

echo yes |installmgr -init
echo yes |installmgr -sc
echo yes |installmgr -r CrossWire
echo yes |installmgr -ri CrossWire KJV
installmgr -l
diatheke -b KJV -k Jn 3:16

If that displays a bunch of text, and then something very similar to:

John 3:16: 
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

(KJV)

then the SWORD installation is basically working.

See also

• International Components for Unicode (ICU)
• CMake for SWORD – experimental
• Bindings for SWORD