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Build instructions

These are the instructions for building the app from its source code, which you might want to do if you are contributing to its development, or trying out a pre-release.

These instructions assume that you have a Linux distribution that is not too old; the most recent long-term-support (LTS) version of Ubuntu Linux (at the time of writing, 24.04) or stable version of Debian Linux (at the time of writing, Bookworm) will do. The instructions should be fairly similar for any other Debian-based distributions, as well.

For Fedora Linux, most instructions will be similar but the package names in the next step will be different. You'll need to work out yourself which packages to install, but the RPM spec file might be helpful.

Install prerequisites

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade --assume-yes --show-progress
sudo apt-get install --assume-yes --show-progress \
    libcanberra-gtk3-module dbus-x11 ninja-build meson \
    libxml2-dev pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libgoocanvas-2.0-dev \
    libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtksourceview-4-dev libgspell-1-dev \
    libhandy-1-dev libplist-dev desktop-file-utils libgstreamer1.0-dev \
    gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
    gstreamer1.0-tools git build-essential

Get the source code

This step will get a copy of the source code of the Inform compiler and the app, and several other tools needed to build them.

git clone -b v7.2.0 https://github.com/ganelson/inweb.git
git clone -b v2.1.0 https://github.com/ganelson/intest.git
git clone -b v10.1.2 https://github.com/ganelson/inform.git
git clone https://github.com/ptomato/inform7-ide.git

Note, this gets specific versions of the Inform compiler and its tools. If that's not what you want — for example, if you want the very newest features of Inform — then you might need to build a different branch of the app. (If you are doing that, we'll assume you know how to work with Git branches and tags.) In that case, leave off the tags from inweb, intest, and inform, and get the inform-next branch of inform7-ide. If there is no inform-next branch, then that's probably because it's not needed; use the main branch in that case.

Build the Inform compiler

There are instructions in the README.md files of the inweb, intest, and inform repositories, but they are summarized below for convenience:

bash inweb/scripts/first.sh linux
bash intest/scripts/first.sh
cd inform
bash scripts/first.sh

(That's just for the first build. If you already built Inform once, and are just updating it after pulling from GitHub, then instead do this:)

cd inform
make -C .. -f inweb/inweb.mk
make -C .. -f intest/intest.mk
make

Regardless of whether this was a first build or a subsequent build, you now need to copy a file that tells where to install the Inform compiler and its materials, to a place where the Inform build process can find it, one level above the inweb, intest, and inform folders:

cp ../inform7-ide/build-aux/make-integration-settings.mk ..

Now do the following to install the files into the inform7-ide folder:

make forceintegration
make retrospective
cp -R retrospective ../inform7-ide/

(On subsequent builds, you don't need to keep copying make-integration-settings.mk unless it has changed. If you're not sure, then copy it every time.)

Build the app and run for testing

Once that’s done, go to the inform7-ide folder:

cd ../inform7-ide

Then you can prepare the build. If the previous steps succeeded, the following command should not complain about being unable to find files:

meson setup _build

Now you can compile and run the app, with

./build-aux/run_uninstalled.sh

System-wide installation

To install it in your system, do the following. Note that this will overwrite any existing installation of the app if you installed a DEB or RPM package.

meson setup _build -Dprefix=/usr
ninja -C _build
sudo ninja -C _build install

After doing that, you'll find it in the apps grid or menu or wherever else you start your apps from.

To install it alongside an existing version, you can also do it slightly differently; replace -Dprefix=/usr with -Dprefix=/usr/local in the above command. That will overwrite any other copy you installed in /usr/local but not the package in /usr. If you do it this way, you have to start it from the terminal; run it with

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu inform7-ide

Or you could put the following in a file called, say, i7ide and put it in ~/.local/bin or elsewhere in your PATH (doing a chmod +x i7ide to ensure it's executable.)

#!/bin/bash
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu inform7-ide "$@" &