There are two sets of releases for LilyPond: stable releases, and unstable development releases. Stable versions have an even-numbered ‘minor’ version number (i.e. 2.8, 2.10, 2.12, etc). Development versions have an odd-numbered ‘minor’ version number (i.e. 2.7, 2.9, 2.11, etc).
Building LilyPond is a very involved process, so we highly recommend using the precompiled binaries.
Check out http://lilypond.org/web/install/ for up to date information on binary packages for your platform. If your operating system is not covered on that general page, please see the complete list at http://download.linuxaudio.org/lilypond/binaries/
We currently create binaries for
darwin-ppc - MacOS X powerpc darwin-x86 - MacOS X intel freebsd-64 - FreeBSD 6.x, x86_64 freebsd-x86 - FreeBSD 4.x, x86 linux-64 - Any GNU/Linux distribution, x86_64 linux-arm - Any GNU/Linux distribution, arm linux-ppc - Any GNU/Linux distribution, powerpc linux-x86 - Any GNU/Linux distribution, x86 mingw - Windows x86
Download source
git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/lilypond.git
The repository does not contain generated files. To create configure, run
./autogen.sh
For information on packaging, see http://lilypond.org/devel.
In addition to the packages needed for running LilyPond (see below), you need the following extra packages for building.
When installing a binary package FOO, you may need to install the FOO-devel, libFOO-dev or FOO-dev package too.
Running LilyPond requires proper installation of the following software
International fonts are required to create music with international text or lyrics.
You can view the documentation online at http://lilypond.org/doc/, but you can also build it locally. This process requires a successful compile of LilyPond, and some additional tools and packages:
To install GNU LilyPond, type
gunzip -c lilypond-x.y.z | tar xf - cd lilypond-x.y.z ./configure # run with --help for applicable options make su -c 'make install'
If you are not root, you should choose a --prefix
argument that
points into your home directory, e.g.
./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr
If you want to build multiple versions of LilyPond with different
configuration settings, you can use the --enable-config=CONF
option of configure. You should use make conf=CONF
to generate the output in out-CONF. For example, suppose you
want to build with and without profiling, then use the following for
the normal build
./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr/ --enable-checking make make install
and for the profiling version, specify a different configuration
./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr/ --enable-profiling --enable-config=prof --disable-checking make conf=prof make conf=prof install
It is possible to compile LilyPond in a build tree different from the
source tree, with --srcdir
option of configure:
mkdir lily-build && cd lily-build sourcedir/configure --srcdir=sourcedir
If a less verbose build output if desired, the variable
QUIET_BUILD
may be set to 1
on make command
line, or in local.make at top of the build tree.
This requires a successful compile of LilyPond, or using an external LilyPond binary.
The documentation is built by issuing
make web
After compilation, the HTML documentation tree is available in out-www/offline-root/, and can be browsed locally.
The HTML and PDF files can be installed into the standard documentation path by issuing
make web-install
This also installs Info documentation with images if the installation prefix is properly set; otherwise, instructions for manual installation of Info documentation are printed on standard output.
It is also possible to build a documentation tree in out-www/online-root/, with special processing, so it can be used on a website with content negotiation for automatic language selection; this can be achieved by issuing
make WEB_TARGETS=online web
and both ‘offline’ and ‘online’ targets can be generated by issuing
make WEB_TARGETS="offline online" web
Several targets are available to clean the documentation build and help with maintaining documentation; an overview of these targets is available with
make help
from every directory in the build tree. Most targets for documentation maintenance are available from Documentation/; for more information, see Documentation/user/README.txt and Documentation/TRANSLATION.
The makefile variable QUIET_BUILD
may be set to 1
for a
less verbose build output, just like for building the programs.
-j
command-line option of make is unsupported for
building the documentation. As the most time consuming task is
running LilyPond to build images of music, the makefile variable
CPU_COUNT
may be set in local.make or on the command line
to the number of .ly
files that LilyPond should process
simultaneously, e.g. on a bi-processor or dual core machine
make CPU_COUNT=2 web
If source files have changed since last documentation build, output
files that need to be rebuilt are normally rebuilt, even if you do not
run make web-clean
first. However, building dependencies in the
documentation are so complex that rebuilding of some targets may not
be triggered as they should be; a workaround is to force rebuilding
by touching appropriate files, e.g.
touch Documentation/user/*.itely touch input/lsr/*.ly
The documentation can be built locally without compiling LilyPond binary, if LilyPond is already installed on your system.
From a fresh Git checkout, do
./autogen.sh # ignore any warning messages cp GNUmakefile.in GNUmakefile make -C python nice make LILYPOND_EXTERNAL_BINARY=/path/to/bin/lilypond web
Please note that this may break sometimes – for example, if a new feature is added with a test file in input/regression, even the latest development release of LilyPond will fail to build the docs.
You may build the manual without building all the input/*
stuff: change directory, for example to Documentation/user,
issue make web
, which will build documentation in a
subdirectory out-www from the source files in current
directory. In this case, if you also want to browse the documentation
in its post-processed form, change back to top directory and issue
make out=www WWW-post
You may also need to create a script for pngtopnm and
pnmtopng
. On GNU/Linux, I use this:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib exec /usr/bin/pngtopnm "$@"
On MacOS X, I use this:
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/sw/lib exec /sw/bin/pngtopnm "$@"
LilyPond comes with an extensive suite that exercises the entire program. This suite can be used to automatically check the impact of a change. This is done as follows
make test-baseline ## apply your changes, compile make check
This will leave an HTML page out/test-results/index.html. This page shows all the important differences that your change introduced, whether in the layout, MIDI, performance or error reporting.
To rerun tests, use
make test-redo ## redo files differing from baseline make test-clean ## remove all test results
and then run make check
again.
For tracking memory usage as part of this test, you will need GUILE CVS; especially the following patch: http://lilypond.org/vc/gub.darcs/patches/guile-1.9-gcstats.patch.
For checking the coverage of the test suite, do the following
./buildscripts/build-coverage.sh # uncovered files, least covered first python ./buildscripts/coverage.py --summary out-cov/*.cc # consecutive uncovered lines, longest first python ./buildscripts/coverage.py --uncovered out-cov/*.cc
For help and questions use lilypond-user@gnu.org. Send bug reports to bug-lilypond@gnu.org.
Bugs that are not fault of LilyPond are documented here.
There is a bug in bison-1.875: compilation fails with "parse error before `goto'" in line 4922 due to a bug in bison. To fix, please recompile bison 1.875 with the following fix
$ cd lily; make out/parser.cc $ vi +4919 out/parser.cc # append a semicolon to the line containing "__attribute__ ((__unused__)) # save $ make
Solaris7, ./configure
./configure needs a POSIX compliant shell. On Solaris7, /bin/sh is not yet POSIX compliant, but /bin/ksh or bash is. Run configure like
CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/ksh ksh -c ./configure
or
CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/bash bash -c ./configure
To use system fonts, dejaview must be installed. With the default port, the fonts are installed in usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/dejavu.
Open the file $LILYPONDBASE/usr/etc/fonts/local.conf and add the
following line just after the <fontconfig>
line. (Adjust as necessary
for your hierarchy.)
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
On MacOS X, all fonts are installed by default. However, finding all
system fonts requires a bit of configuration; see
this post on the lilypond-user
mailing list.
On Linux, international fonts are installed by different means on every distribution. We cannot list the exact commands or packages that are necessary, as each distribution is different, and the exact package names within each distribution changes. Here are some hints, though:
Red Hat Fedora taipeifonts fonts-xorg-truetype ttfonts-ja fonts-arabic \ ttfonts-zh_CN fonts-ja fonts-hebrew Debian GNU/Linux apt-get install emacs-intl-fonts xfonts-intl-.* \ ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-kochi-mincho \ xfonts-bolkhov-75dpi xfonts-cronyx-100dpi xfonts-cronyx-75dpi
This page is for LilyPond-2.11.58 (development-branch).
Report errors to http://post.gmane.org/post.php?group=gmane.comp.gnu.lilypond.bugs.
Your suggestions for the documentation are welcome.