Build status :

Kiwix is an offline reader for Web content. It's especially thought to make Wikipedia available offline. This is done by reading the content of the project stored in a file format ZIM, a high compressed open format with additional meta-data.

This repository contains a set of tools to help development or usage of kiwix.

COMPILATION INSTRUCTIONS

Most of the compilation steps are handled by the kiwix-build.py script.

This script has been tested of Fedora 23 and Ubuntu 16.10

Take care, the paragraphs are about the target platforms. If you want to build Kiwix for Android on a GNU/Linux system, you should follow the instructions of the "Android" paragraph.

Preparing environment

You will need a recent version of meson (0.34) and ninja (1.6) If your distribution provide a recent enough versions for them, just install them with your package manager.

Else you can install them manually

Meson

pip install meson --user # Install Meson

(You may want to install meson in a virtualenv if you prefer)

ninja

git clone git://github.com/ninja-build/ninja.git
cd ninja
git checkout release
./configure.py --bootstrap
cp ninja <a_directory_in_your_path>

Buildings

This is the simple one.

./kiwix-build.py

It will compile everything. If you are using a supported platform (redhad or debian based) it will install missing packages using sudo. If you don't want to trust kiwix-build.py and give it the root right, just launch yourself the the printed command.

Outputs

Kiwix-build.py will create several directories:

• ARCHIVES : All the downloaded archives go there.
• SOURCES : All the sources (extracted from archives and patched) go there.
• BUILD_native_dyn : All the build files go there.
• BUILD_native_dyn/INSTALL : The installed files go there.
• BUILD_native_dyn/LOGS: The logs files of the build.

ARCHIVES and SOURCES are independent of the build type you choose.

If you want to install all those directories elsewhere, you can pass the --working-dir option:

./kiwix-build.py --working-dir <a_directory_somewhere>

Other target

By default, kiwix-build will build kiwix-tools and all its dependencies. If you want to compile another target only (let's said kiwixlib), you can specify it:

./kiwix-build Kiwixlib

Other target platforms.

By default, kiwix-build will build everything for the current (native) platform using dynamic linkage (hence the native_dyn of the BUILD_* directory).

But you can select another target platforms using the option target-platform. For now, there is ten different platform supported :

• native_dyn
• native_static
• win32_dyn
• win32_static
• android_arm
• android_arm64
• android_mips
• android_mips64
• android_x86
• android_x86_64

So, if you want to compile for win32 using static linkage:

./kiwix-build.py --target-platform win32_dyn

As said before, the ARCHIVES and SOURCES directories are common of the target platform. So, if you always work in the same working directory the sources will not be downloaded and prepared again.

On android* platforms, only kiwixlib is supported. So you must ask to kiwix-build to compile only kiwixlib:

./kiwix-build.py --target-platform android_arm Kiwixlib

Know bugs

• The script has not been tested on Mac OSX.
• Cross-compilation to arm (raspberry-PI) is missing.

Help is welcome on those parts.

CONTACT

IRC: #kiwix on irc.freenode.net
(I'm hidding myself under the starmad pseudo)

You can use IRC web interface on http://chat.kiwix.org/

More... http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication

LEGAL & DISCLAIMER

Read 'COPYING' file