1 Build and install instructions for Notmuch.
5 The process for compiling and installing Notmuch is the very standard
12 In fact, if you don't plan to pass any arguments to the configure
13 script, then you can skip that step and just start with "make", (which
14 will call configure for you). See this command:
18 for detailed documentation of the things you can control at the
23 Notmuch depends on four libraries: Xapian, GMime 3.0,
24 Talloc, and zlib which are each described below:
28 Xapian is the search-engine library underlying Notmuch.
30 It provides all the real machinery of indexing and searching,
31 (including the very nice parsing of the query string).
33 Xapian is available from https://xapian.org
37 GMime provides decoding of MIME email messages for Notmuch.
39 Without GMime, Notmuch would not be able to extract and index
40 the actual text from email message encoded as BASE64, etc.
42 GMime is available from https://github.com/jstedfast/gmime
47 sfsexp is the "small fast s-expression" library. Notmuch
48 optionally use it to provide a second query parser.
50 sfsexp is available from https://github.com/mjsottile/sfsexp.
51 In Debian Bookworm and later, install libsexp-dev.
55 Talloc is a memory-pool allocator used by Notmuch.
57 Talloc is an extremely lightweight and easy-to-use tool for
58 allocating memory in a hierarchical fashion and then freeing
59 it with a single call of the top-level handle. Using it has
60 made development of Notmuch much easier and much less prone to
63 Talloc is available from https://talloc.samba.org/
68 zlib is an extremely popular compression library. It is used
69 by Xapian, so if you installed that you will already have
70 zlib. You may need to install the zlib headers separately.
72 Notmuch needs the transparent write feature of zlib introduced
73 in version 1.2.5.2 (Dec. 2011).
75 zlib is available from https://zlib.net
77 Building Documentation
78 ----------------------
80 To build the documentation for notmuch you need at least version 1.0
81 of sphinx (Jul. 2010).
83 Sphinx is available from www.sphinx-doc.org.
85 To install the documentation as "info" pages, you will need the
86 additional tools makeinfo and install-info.
88 Installing Dependencies from Packages
89 -------------------------------------
91 On a modern, package-based operating system you can install all of the
92 dependencies with a single simple command line. For example:
94 For Debian and similar:
96 sudo apt-get install libxapian-dev libgmime-3.0-dev libtalloc-dev zlib1g-dev python3-sphinx texinfo install-info
98 For Fedora and similar:
100 sudo dnf install xapian-core-devel gmime30-devel libtalloc-devel zlib-devel python3-sphinx texinfo info
102 On other systems, a similar command can be used, but the details of
103 the package names may be different.