You can choose to compile YAZ from official tar releases from http://ftp.indexdata.com/pub/yaz/ or clone it via GitHub https://github.com/indexdata/yaz.git.

If you wish to use character set conversion facilities in YAZ or if you are compiling YAZ for use with Zebra, it is a good idea to ensure that the iconv library is installed. Some Unixes today already have it - if not, we suggest GNU libiconv.

YAZ 3.0.16 and later includes a wrapper for the ICU (International Components for Unicode). In order to use this, the developer version of the ICU library must be available. ICU support is recommended for applications such as Pazpar2 and Zebra.

The libxslt, libxml2 libraries are required if YAZ is to support SRU/Solr. These libraries are very portable and should compile out-of-the box on virtually all Unix platforms. It is available in binary forms for Linux and others.

The GNU tools Autoconf, Automake and Libtool are used to generate Makefiles and configure YAZ for the system. You do not need these tools unless you're using the Git version of YAZ.

The CQL parser for YAZ is built using GNU Bison. This tool is only needed if you're using the Git version of YAZ.

YAZ includes a tiny ASN.1 compiler. This compiler is written in Tcl. But as for Bison you do not need it unless you're using Git version of YAZ or you're using the compiler to build your own codecs for private ASN.1.

If you are checking out from Git, run:

      ./buildconf.sh
     

This will create the configure script and Makefiles.

The next step is always:

     ./configure
    

The configure script attempts to use use the C compiler specified by the CC environment variable. If not set, GNU C will be used if it is available. The CFLAGS environment variable holds options to be passed to the C compiler. If you're using Bourne-compatible shell, you may pass something like this to use a particular C compiler with optimization enabled:

     CC=/opt/ccs/bin/cc CFLAGS=-O ./configure
    

To customize YAZ, the configure script also accepts a set of options. The most important are:

When configured, build the software by typing:

      make
     

The following files are generated by the make process:

If you wish to install YAZ in system directories /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib .. etc, you can type:

     make install
    

You probably need to have root access in order to perform this. You must specify the --prefix option for configure if you wish to install YAZ in other directories than the default /usr/local/.

If you wish to perform an un-installation of YAZ, use:

     make uninstall
    

This will only work if you haven't reconfigured YAZ (and therefore changed installation prefix). Note that uninstall will not remove directories created by make install, e.g. /usr/local/include/yaz.

Compiling from source on MacOSX requires libxml2. This can be installed with Homebrew, for instance:

         brew install libxml2
       

Review the Caveats section (brew info libxml2) for the LDFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, and PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variables before executing the ./compile command. For instance:

         export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/libxml2/lib"
         export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/libxml2/include"
         export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/libxml2/lib/pkgconfig"
         ./configure
         make
       

This section describes how to compile - and link your own applications using the YAZ toolkit. If you're used to Makefiles this shouldn't be hard. As for other libraries you have used before, you need to set a proper include path for your C/C++ compiler and specify the location of YAZ libraries. You can do it by hand, but generally we suggest you use the yaz-config that is generated by configure. This is especially important if you're using the threaded version of YAZ which require you to pass more options to your linker/compiler.

The yaz-config script accepts command line options that makes the yaz-config script print options that you should use in your make process. The most important ones are: --cflags, --libs which prints C compiler flags, and linker flags respectively.

A small and complete Makefile for a C application consisting of one source file, myprog.c, may look like this:

      YAZCONFIG=/usr/local/bin/yaz-config
      CFLAGS=`$(YAZCONFIG) --cflags`
      LIBS=`$(YAZCONFIG) --libs`
      myprog: myprog.o
         $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o myprog myprog.o $(LIBS)
      

The CFLAGS variable consists of a C compiler directive that will set the include path to the parent directory of yaz. That is, if YAZ header files were installed in /usr/local/include/yaz, then include path is set to /usr/local/include. Therefore, in your applications you should use

      #include <yaz/proto.h>
     

and not

      #include <proto.h>
     

For Libtool users, the yaz-config script provides a different variant of option --libs, called --lalibs that returns the name of the Libtool archive(s) for YAZ rather than the ordinary ones.

For applications using the threaded version of YAZ, specify threads after the other options. When threads is given, more flags and linker flags will be printed by yaz-config. If our previous example was using threads, you'd have to modify the lines that set CFLAGS and LIBS as follows:

      CFLAGS=`$(YAZCONFIG) --cflags threads`
      LIBS=`$(YAZCONFIG) --libs threads`
     

There is no need specify POSIX thread libraries in your Makefile. The LIBS variable includes that as well.