Building RKWard from Source

Note: These instructions are targetted at Linux/FreeBSD, where most required tools for compilation from source are readily available. Instructions for building on Windows, and building on MacOS, are available on the respective platform specific pages.

Getting the source code

Refer to Available source packages or Getting the source from git.

Installing required dependencies

At the time of this writing, RKWard requires:

Finding the appropriate naming of the required packages to install is the hardest part. Often it is easiest to look at the list of build dependencies for older versions of rkward contained in your distribution. Don't shy away from asking for help.

At the time of this writing, on Debian based systems (such as Ubuntu) the following will get all the dependencies installed (and hopefully the package names will be similar on other distributions):

apt-get install cmake extra-cmake-modules pkg-kde-tools debhelper qt6-webengine-dev qt6-5compat-dev libkf6notifications-dev gettext libkf6coreaddons-dev libkf6crash-dev libkf6guiaddons-dev libkf6i18n-dev libkf6iconthemes-dev libkf6breezeicons-dev libkf6texteditor-dev libkf6textwidgets-dev libkf6windowsystem-dev libkf6xmlgui-dev pkgconf r-base-dev

On Arch linux: pacman -S qt6-webengine qt6-script qt6-declarative ktexteditor r extra-cmake-modules kdoctools

(Consider contributing the corresponding list for your distribution of choice as a merge request for this website).

Compilation

IMPORTANT: You will need to have the R shared library installed. This is typically located in a place like /usr/lib/R/lib/libR.so. Unfortunately, some distributions do not yet ship their R binary with the shared library. In those (rare) cases, you'll have to compile and install R on your own with the option --enable-R-shlib.

Suppose the source is obtained as rkward-0.8.1.tar.gz (assuming version 0.8.1). Then, the recommended steps to build from source are:

tar xzf rkward-0.8.1.tar.gz    # extracts to "rkward-0.8.1" directory
cd rkward-0.8.1
mkdir build                    # dedicated build directory is recommended, but not required
cd build
cmake .. [options]             # see *CMake options* below
make -j 5                      # the j parameter specifies the number of parallel units to compile;
                               # on systems with many cores, a higher value will speed up the build
sudo make install

CMake options (configuring)

The first paramter to cmake is the path to the rkward sources. In the example above, the build directory was created inside the extracted source directory, CMakeLists.txt exists in the directory immediately above; hence ".." is the appropriate path in this setup.

A number of parameters may be specified to control the build process. Some commonly needed are:

  • -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
    • set the installation base directory. Generally -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde5-config --prefix` should be correct.
  • -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE
    • type of build. Useful settings include -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release and -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull

In some cases you may want to set the following options:

  • -DR_EXECUTABLE
    • path to the R executable to build for. You may want to set this, if you have multiple versions of R installed, or R is not in your path. Example: -DR_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/R
  • -DR_HOME
    • R home directory. Almost certainly this option is not needed.
  • -DR_INCLUDEDIR
    • path to R include files. Almost certainly this option is not needed.

Further generic options are listed on http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_Useful_Variables .

Installation

As a last step, you have to run make install. Otherwise RKWard will be missing important menu-options, may behave strangely, or may not run at all. As this will require admin permissions, use: sudo make install

Make sure you have set the correct path in cmake (the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX option).

Running

For now it's recommended to run RKWard from the command-line for debug-output. For the few available command-line options see

rkward --help

Troubleshooting

The most common source of problems are

  1. Missing some of the build requirements
  2. Wrong / missing parameters to cmake

So please re-read the corresponding sections, first. If you're still in trouble, let us know, we'll be happy to help you.

For some systems, Binaries_and_Build_Scripts has more information.