These instructions are written for Debian/Ubuntu; adjust for your distribution. Some extra notes have been provided by a forum member, though some of the things mentioned there no longer apply: https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/guide-how-to-build-and-run-anki-from-source-with-xubuntu-20-04/12865
You can see a full list of buildtime and runtime requirements by looking at the Dockerfiles used to build the official releases.
Glibc is required - if you are on a distro like Alpine that uses musl, things may not work.
Users on ARM64, see the notes at the bottom of this file before proceeding.
Ensure some basic tools are installed:
$ sudo apt install bash grep findutils curl gcc g++ git rsync ninja-build
- The 'find' utility is 'findutils' on Debian.
- Your distro may call the package 'ninja' instead of 'ninja-build', or it may not have a version new enough - if so, install from the zip mentioned in development.md.
If you get errors during build or startup, try starting with
QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1 ./run
It will likely complain about missing libraries, which you can install with your package manager. Some of the libraries that might be required on Debian for example:
sudo apt install libxcb-icccm4 libxcb-image0 libxcb-keysyms1 \
libxcb-randr0 libxcb-render-util0
On some distros such as Arch Linux and Fedora, you may need to install the
libxcrypt-compat package if you get an error like this:
error while loading shared libraries: libcrypt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
To play and record audio during development, install mpv and lame.
Other platforms download PyQt binary wheels from PyPI. There are no PyQt wheels available for ARM Linux, so you will need to rely on your system-provided libraries instead. As Anki requires Python 3.9, this means you will need a fairly up-to-date distro such as Debian 11.
After installing the system libraries (eg 'sudo apt install python3-pyqt5.qtwebengine'), find the place they are installed (eg '/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages'). Then before running any commands like './run', tell Anki where they can be found:
export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages
There are a few things to be aware of:
- You should use ./run and not tools/run-qt5*, even if your system libraries are Qt5.
- If your system libraries are Qt5, when creating an aqt wheel, the wheel will not work on Qt6 environments.
- Some of the './ninja check' tests are broken on ARM Linux.
Python, node and protoc are downloaded as part of the build. You can optionally define PYTHON_BINARY, NODE_BINARY and/or PROTOC_BINARY to use locally-installed versions instead.
If rust-toolchain.toml is removed, newer Rust versions can be used. Older versions may or may not compile the code.
For info on running tests, building wheels and so on, please see Development.