Development/BuildingOnLinux

Introductory notice
Since this turns out to be the common problem with newbies, please note: do not build as root! This will break your build, and as the result, you'll need to cleanup everything (including ccache) and start over. The steps that need elevation use sudo explicitly in the following explanation.

Do also read our generic building hints.

Build dependencies
In general, the easiest way to build LibreOffice is on Linux.

Note: Windows Subsystem for Linux is not supported!

Debian and Ubuntu
Install the dependencies

sudo apt-get install git build-essential zip ccache junit4 libkrb5-dev nasm graphviz python3 python3-dev qtbase5-dev libkf5coreaddons-dev libkf5i18n-dev libkf5config-dev libkf5windowsystem-dev libkf5kio-dev autoconf libcups2-dev libfontconfig1-dev gperf default-jdk doxygen libxslt1-dev xsltproc libxml2-utils libxrandr-dev libx11-dev bison flex libgtk-3-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev ant ant-optional libnss3-dev libavahi-client-dev

openSUSE
The dependencies can be installed on Tumbleweed with this command:

sudo zypper in git autoconf automake make gcc gcc-c++ cups-devel fontconfig-devel gperf java-11-openjdk-devel libxslt-devel python3-devel krb5-devel libX11-devel libXext-devel libICE-devel libSM-devel libXt-devel libXrender-devel libXrandr-devel flex gtk3-devel gstreamer-devel gstreamer-plugins-base-devel ant junit nasm ccache binutils-gold mozilla-nss-devel

Fedora/RedHat
Then you will either need to use the alternatives system to make your whole system use java11, or add this to your autogen.input:

Arch Linux
These make dependencies are copied from the official PKGBUILD of Arch Build System (with some modifications as it includes stuff that is not needed).

If you don't plan to be working on Java, you can remove ant, beanshell, java-environment and junit from this list as LibreOffice mostly runs without it.

If 'gcc-libs-multilib' is installed, you will have to remove the 'gcc-libs' dependency.

BSDs

 * DragonFlyBSD
 * FreeBSD
 * NetBSD

Cloning and building
Next, we  the repository and start to build:

At this point, you might want to consider additional options to pass to autogen with

For example consider adding a Debugging option. Changing some of these options will require to do a full rebuild: e.g., adding. Since the following command  takes a vast quantity of time to run for the first time, you probably would like to save time by specifying the settings you'd need depending on the ultimate goal of your build. In case of doubt, possibly it's good to ask for advice on #libreoffice-dev.

It is a good idea to first run make, so you have a working build in case make check later fails.

takes a while too.

Running your build
This will create you a good local installation, which you can then start with:

Getting Started with LibreOffice Development
The video illustrates the process of setting up a development environment and building. However, please use the wiki documentation for your setup instead of trying to write things down from what you see in the video.

Running under a debugger
For starting your build directly under a debugger:

Then you can open Writer with the command:

(gdb) run --writer

Note that soffice.bin will be terminated the first time it is run directly (or via make debugrun), this is normal, you simply need to run it again to make use of it. Running soffice will deal with this for you.

Enable warnings
Various versions of GCC are well-known to emit more/unhelpful/bogus warnings at higher optimization levels. Don't even try to combine  build with GCC.

Performance
Building LibreOffice takes time, a lot of time. Exactly how much depends on how powerful your machine is. But there are tools you can use to speed-up things.

ccache
ccache is a tool that caches the results of C/C++ compilation to try to re-use them later. It will not speed-up your initial build (on the contrary it will slow it down a bit), but it can dramatically speed up later re-building. If you plan to change lots of header files in LibreOffice, it is a worthy tool to have.

By default, ccache will be enabled automatically if it is found on your system. For best results, you may want to increase the cache size or enable cache compression; `man ccache` is your friend.

Note that the default cache size is just 5GB which is far too small to be useful for a LibreOffice build; for a build without debug symbols, you should have at least 8GB cache, and for a build with debug symbols for everything probably 32GB is a useful starting point. You can set the size like this (note that this setting is stored inside the cache directory, if you change the location by setting  you have to re-do it):

ccache --max-size 32G

ccache also supports compression, which is very likely a good idea to enable (does anybody have hard numbers?), especially if you are using a small or slow storage medium, like a SSD or laptop hard disk. You can enable compression by adding this to your  or equivalent:

export CCACHE_COMPRESS=1

Icecream / distcc
If you are in an environment where you have access to multiple machines with spare cpu cycles, you can take a look at icecream or distcc tools for distributed build. Icecream is recommended and easier to setup.

Support for Icecream is built into LibreOffice, it is enough to add    to  , and the configure process will pre-set number of jobs to use, and will try to find the icecream gcc wrappers in   or in. Should you have them somewhere else, please use   switch to override that.

To make use of distcc, first install and start  on all the build machines and make sure all the compiler versions are compatible (this is important for C++ code). Now on the driving machine install and configure  to use the other build hosts. Then pass  to autogen.sh, where N is the total number of CPUs available in your cluster and run   to start the distributed build.

Precompiled headers
Passing  to autogen.sh enables use of precompiled headers (PCH), which reduce build time at the expense of more disk space and more source files possibly rebuilt when a header changes. The option has several levels (system, base, normal, full), the higher level the higher possible gain but also disk space usage and chance for larger rebuilds on changes.

--with-parallelism
The build process can be told to run multiple tasks in parallel. The parallelism is controlled by the autogen.sh parameter --with-parallelism. If you have enough memory, I found that using --with-parallelism=n where n is your number of cores, or 2 for --with-parallelism if you have only 1 core, give me the fastest build time.

--with-parallelism already defaults to the the number of cores/cpus on your system, unless you use --enable-icecream - then to 10.

--with-system-libs
Building with existing libraries may speed up your build, but you have to fiddle with the dependencies.

Approximate build times
The first build or a clean build takes approximately  hours on a recent processor. With ccache, subsequent daily build time varies between 2 and 10 min (depending on the number of modified or added files and their complexity).

Verbose make
Make will hide the exact command invocations. To see what make does exactly for a single run one can invoke it as

Using, in turn sets this option for the child   invocations, and also deals with externals. In the verbose mode, every single command used to build LibreOffice is shown, in which can be used for troubleshooting build problems.

Multiple Work Dirs
If you want to work on both the master branch, and the current release branch(es) at the same time, you can share git repos, and external source tarballs (note the savings can be significant, especially if you also use the quite huge l10n repo). Note that switching between different release branches within the same working dir is not recommended; even if there are no dependency problems, the amount of stuff you'd have to rebuild is practically equal to a clean rebuild. If you can afford the diskspace, maintaining separate trees is the recommended way.

There are two methods to share git repos across working directories: git clone --reference and git-new-workdir. A referenced clone can avoid re-downloading the repo, but the new workdir will still have its own .git/config, etc. This is supported by upstream git developers. git-new-workdir, however, is not supported and can cause problems if you try to check out the same branch in two working directories, etc.

Setup
Prepare the first build on your disk just like explained above. For the second, and all other builds, do this to clone the initial core repo:

You'll notice a much quicker clone operation. After that, setup the new work dir with these two extra configure (or autogen.sh) options:

Again, cloning will be much faster. You have to use an absolute path for the --with-external-tar option. After that, you proceed with building just like for the single-workdir case.

The --with-referenced-git option is only needed if you enabled some submodules (translations, dictionaries or help) or you're building the libreoffice-4-0 branch (or one that is even older). On newer branches submodules are disabled by default.

If you want to cherry-pick between the working directories, you can setup your local copy of git to act like a remote, like this:

You then just cherry-pick commits like you would to a "true" remote on another server.

Checking out a release branch
run  on master with the specific parameters you need, then run   to fetch the submodules that may be needed depending on the parameters you passed to autogen.sh

then switch branch with

rpm not found/ant not found/no package gnome-vfs-2.0
--disable-epm This will fix "rpm not found", as autogen.sh expects to find either dpkg or rpm on the system.

--without-java This will fix "ant not found"

As of the master towards LibreOffice 3.6, to build the UNO SDK you need to have Doxygen installed so that HTML documentation for the C++ UNO interface can be generated. One option is to install Doxygen from its website and make sure the  executable is found on the , or specify its exact location via   configure switch. Another option is to configure, in which case the HTML documentation for the C++ UNO interface will be missing from the UNO SDK being built. A third option is to configure, in which case the UNO SDK is not built at all.

Note: Installing 'libgnomevfs2-dev' package on Ubuntu manually will fix "No package 'gnome-vfs-2.0' found" on older release branches. It should not be needed anymore on master by now. Use synaptic package manager or run in terminal

Build DEB and/or RPM Packages
If you are wanting to build DEB or RPM packages, add the appropriate options to your  file:
 * RPM
 * DEB

The basic TDF distro configs can be found in the distro-configs module. For Linux, look at distro-configs/LibreOfficeLinux.conf.

Where are the packages?
Look for the files in the ./workdir/installation/ directory. There is a folder for each of the different sets of packages that includes subfolder[s] for the type or types of packages, either DEB, RPM, or both. Inside the subfolder[s] is another folder called install, and it includes two subfolders. One subfolder contains an archive of all of the packages zipped together (the ..._download folder) and the other contains a DEBS/RPMS folder with each individual package. The rest should be self-explanitory!

Dealing with line endings and Git's autocrlf
If autogen.sh produces output like the following:

... then you probably have line ending problems. This might occur if you mistakenly set Git's.

To fix the issue, run these commands (WARNING: uncommitted changes will be lost!):

Building translated user interface with .po files TDF Weblate
LibreOffice's user interface is translated using .po files hosted on TDF Weblate server and translations are update and packaged as language packs with every new release for every branch respectively. That often means language pack is not reflecting all the improvements made in-between releases and nightly builds exists only for a handful of languages. Translators might benefit from testing their work before new release been published and but early adopters could test translations before official release.

First make sure you managed build dependencies and then try to clone and run your build.

Building translated user interface

 * 1) Firstly you need to download .po files from TDF Weblate. You might log-in to TDF Weblate to download .po files.
 * 2) rebuild the source with language pack option on using command   and don't forget to replace  with actual language code. If using an autogen.input file, no quotes are used, so this becomes: --with-lang=de ja ar
 * 3) extract downloaded .po files and copy content to relevant directories in source tree using command (on GNU/Linux)   and don't forget to replace   (two occurrences) with actual language code
 * 4) this step might be tricky. It seems that some extracted .po files are named 'messages.po' and some are named differently. What you need is every .po file converted to .mo file and
 * 5) for files that are **not named** 'messages.po', conversion is done by running
 * 6) for files that **are** named 'messages.po' you need to convert to .mo files manually running   for every such file. Here three things must be changed:  to actuall language code,  with data from the left column of the table below and with data from right side of table below. Just make sure you prefix path ' /messages.po' with full path from current working to destination.

As mentioned in step 4, some .po files are named 'messages.po' and some are named differently. Table bellow lists directories which might hold 'messages.po' files and on which step 4.2 should be applied.

Last step in process is to run  to install with newly added translations.

If you would like to build LibreOffice-master and check the translation, you may need "make translations" to merge .po file with the .pot files.

Building translated Help files
Help files are also translated on TDF Weblate so for translated Help file this can be done


 * 1) by downloading .po files of translated Help
 * 2) run   replacing   with actual language code. If you want to build Help as HTML files, do  . If using an autogen.input file, no quotes are used, so this becomes: --with-lang=de ja ar
 * 3) run
 * 4) run , but remember to replace two instances of  with actual language code and make sure you navigate to this folder correctly from current working directory
 * 5) run  . Replace two instances of  with actual language code and make sure you navigate to this folder correctly from current working directory
 * 6) run
 * 7) run

(Thanks to Kiyotaka and Jihui)