1 Getting Started

1.1 Downloading

Serd is distributed in several ways. There are no “official” binaries, only source code releases which must be compiled. However, many operating system distributions do package binaries. Check if your package manager has a reasonably recent package, if so, that is the easiest and most reliable installation method.

Release announcements with links to source code archives can be found at https://drobilla.net/category/serd/. All release archives and their signatures are available in the directory http://download.drobilla.net/.

The code can also be checked out of git:

git clone https://gitlab.com/drobilla/serd.git

1.2 Compiling

Serd uses the meson build system. From within an extracted release archive or repository checkout, the library can be built and tested with default options like so:

meson setup build
cd build
ninja test

There are many configuration options, which can be displayed by running meson configure.

See the meson documentation for more details on using meson.

1.3 Installing

If the library compiled successfully, then ninja install can be used to install it. Note that you may need superuser privileges, for example:

sudo ninja install

The installation prefix can be changed by setting the prefix option, for example:

meson configure -Dprefix=/opt/serd

If you do not want to install anything, you can also “vendor” the code in your project (provided, of course, that you adhere to the terms of the license). If you are using meson, then it should simply work as a subproject without modification. Otherwise, you will need to set up the build yourself.

1.4 Including

Serd installs a pkg-config file, which can be used to set the appropriate compiler and linker flags for projects to use it. If installed to a standard prefix, then it should show up in pkg-config automatically:

pkg-config --list-all | grep serd

If not, you may need to adjust the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable to include the installation prefix, for example:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/serd/lib/pkgconfig
pkg-config --list-all | grep serd

Most popular build systems natively support pkg-config. For example, in meson:

serd_dep = dependency('serd-1')

On systems where pkg-config is not available, you will need to set up compiler and linker flags manually, by adding something like -I/opt/serd/include/serd-1, and -lserd-1, respectively.

Once things are set up, you should be able to include the API header and start using Serd in your code.