Building

General Instructions

For the very latest source code, get the sources from Subversion; alternatively, use the latest release source file of type gnucash-<version>.tar.gz. Examine the README.dependencies file for the list of build dependencies for your distribution, the README.svn file for notes on compiling gnucash, and the HACKING file for notes on hacking the code.

Here are the basic steps one might end up taking:

1. Change to gnucash directory

 cd gnucash

2. If this code was retrieved from SVN, generate the configure script (otherwise skip this step)

 ./autogen.sh 

3. Look at available configure options

 ./configure --help

4. Run configure with the appropriate options; some example options might look as follows

 ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnucash \
    --enable-debug --enable-doxygen \
    --enable-error-on-warning --enable-compile-warnings \
    [--enable-ofx [...]]

5. Compile and install

 make
 make install

6. Run

 /opt/gnucash/bin/gnucash

Distro-specific Information

See the README.dependencies file for library dependency notes.

Debian

On Debian, the packages you'll probably need are (among many others):

swig
libgnomeui-dev
libofx-dev
libgsf-1-dev
libgtkhtml3.2-dev (3.6 or 3.8 will also do)

For the 2.0-branch of GnuCash you need additionally:

libgwrapguile-dev OR
guile-g-wrap

If you see the error "<unnamed port>: no code for module (g-wrap gw standard)" at runtime, see this particular FAQ.

Ubuntu

If you are on an older version of ubuntu (or debian for that matter) such as dapper with long-term support and need certain packages that are not available from the dapper-backports do not fret. You can easily compile them yourself (essentially backporting them). Make sure you have a line of the form

deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy main restricted universe

in your /etc/apt/sources.list. You want the version (edgy in above example) to be at least one release higher than what you have installed. Then you can use the following lines to compile and install any software version that you need but is missing from the official repositories for the release you run.

cd /usr/src
sudo apt-get build-dep $packageyouwant
apt-get --compile source $packageyouwant
dpkg -i $packageyouwant.deb

Easy as 1-2-3!

Breezy Badger

Please see the BreezyBadgerInstallation page for more information on installing a beta snapshot of GnuCash on Breezy Badger.

Dapper Flight 7

get necessary packages

On a fresh install of Ubuntu/Dapper, do the following to be able to compile trunk gnucash:

sudo apt-get install libguile-dev libgwrapguile-dev guile-www

There are possibly other dependencies (that I already had installed), but this should get you started.

The below was ok for Flight 5

sudo apt-get install libgnomeui-dev libofx-dev libgsf-1-dev \
libgtkhtml3.8-dev guile-g-wrap libltdl3-dev g-wrap doxygen \
libgsf-gnome-1-dev automake1.9 texinfo build-essential intltool \
libtool subversion libfinance-quote-perl

For straight Dapper, I needed:

sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev intltool automake1.9 autoconf libtool libgconf2-dev swig slib libxml2

Create development tree

mkdir -p $HOME/development/gnucash
mkdir -p $HOME/unstable/gnucash

Check out gnucash trunk

cd $HOME/development/gnucash
svn checkout http://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk gnucash

Compile gnucash

cd gnucash
./autogen.sh

./configure --prefix=$HOME/unstable/gnucash \
   --enable-debug --enable-doxygen \
   --enable-error-on-warning --enable-compile-warnings

make all install

Start newly compiled gnucash

cd $HOME/unstable/gnucash/bin
./gnucash

Feisty

Get Dependencies

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall guile-1.6-dev guile-1.6-slib libgoffice-0-dev libgtkhtml3.14-dev texinfo gettext intltool libtool swig

Get GnuCash 2.2 Source

wget http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/sources/stable/gnucash-2.2.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf gnucash-2.2.1.tar.gz
cd gnucash-2.2.1

Create make files (only if checking out from SVN)

./autogen.sh

Configure

./configure

If this command complains about not finding libraries (it shouldn't), then you can probably find them in Synaptic.

Build .deb for GnuCash 2.2

checkinstall --default --install=no

This will take maybe 10 minutes, and it will build an installer file called "gnucash_2.2.1-1_i386.deb". (If it's got a different name, substitute that into the next step.)

Install the .deb that you built

sudo dpkg -i gnucash_2.2.1-1_i386.deb

If you get errors about dpkg not being able to overwrite files (I did), you can override them with this version:

sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite gnucash_2.2.1-1_i386.deb

Run GnuCash

gnucash

Build and install Documentation

If you want the GnuCash documentation, you have to build and install that separately. I couldn't get "checkinstall" to build a deb for the documentation, so I had to use make and make install as follows:

Comment: I got it to work by firering "make" first (after configure) and "checkinstall --default --install=no" afterwords.

wget http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/sources/stable/gnucash-docs-2.2.0.tar.gz
tar zxvf gnucash-docs-2.2.0.tar.gz
cd gnucash-docs-2.2.0
./configure
make
sudo make install

Warning (place this comment in a better place): In package guile-1.6-dev, the script /usr/bin/guile-config is missing. This script is used by Gnucash's ./configure in the building steps to determine the specific structure of ubuntu guile installation. Its absence causes ./configure to break with a "Check your guile config" even if all is perfectly installed. To solve this problem, I have downloaded the debian counterpart package of guile-dev 1.6.8, then extracted from it the seeked guile-config file and finally placed it in /usr/bin/. Gnucash 2.2.1 building was then perfect. You can extract easily a file from a .deb using alien -t debfile.deb (you have to apt-get alien) to obtain a .tgz file. Hope this helps others.

Gentoo

Gentoo instructions can be found on Gnucash-svn installation on Gentoo.

Mac OS X

Mac OS X instructions can be found on gnucash installation from source on Mac OS X.

Fedora Core 5

At least the following packages are required to build GnuCash from source on FC5:

libtool-ltdl-devel
guile-devel
g-wrap-devel
libgnomeprint22-devel
libgnomeprintui22-devel
gtkhtml3-devel

Suggested way to satify all requirements:

# yum install libtool-ltdl-devel guile-devel g-wrap-devel libgnomeprint22-devel \
  libgnomeprintui22-devel gtkhtml3-devel

Please note that while the configure script only checks for GtkHTML up to 3.8, recent versions of GtkHTML ship with "libgtkhtml-3.8.pc" so yes, you CAN use gtkhtml3-3.10 on FC5.