Building wxPython 2.7 for Development and Testing
=================================================
This file describes how I build wxWidgets and wxPython while doing
development and testing, and is meant to help other people that want
to do the same thing. I'll assume that you are using either a CVS
snapshot from http://wxWidgets.org/snapshots/, a checkout from CVS, or
one of the released wxPython-src-2.7.* tarballs. I'll also assume that
you know your way around your system, the compiler, etc. and most
importantly, that you know what you are doing! ;-)
If you want to also install the version of wxPython you build to be in
your site-packages dir and be your default version of wxPython, then a
few additional steps are needed, and you may want to use slightly
different options. See the INSTALL_ document for more details. If
you only use the instructions in this BUILD_ document file then you
will end up with a separate installation of wxPython and you can
switch back and forth between this and the release version that you
may already have installed.
.. _INSTALL: INSTALL.html
.. _BUILD: BUILD.html
If you want to make changes to any of the ``*.i`` files, (SWIG
interface definition files,) or to regenerate the extension sources or
renamer modules, then you will need an up to date version of SWIG,
plus some patches. Get the sources for version 1.3.29, and then apply
the patches in wxPython/SWIG and then build SWIG like normal. See the
README.txt in the wxPython/SWIG dir for details about each patch and
also info about those that may already have been applied to the SWIG
sources. If you install this build of SWIG to a location that is not
on the PATH (so it doesn't interfere with an existing SWIG install for
example) then you can use a setup.py command-line option named SWIG
set to the full path name of the executable and the wxPython build will
use it. See below for an example.
In the text below I'll use WXDIR with environment variable syntax
(either $WXDIR or %WXDIR%) to refer to the top level directory where
your wxWidgets and wxPython sources are located. It will equate to
whereever you checked out the wxWidgets module from CVS, or untarred
the wxPython-src tarball to. You can either substitute the $WXDIR text
below with your actual dir, or set the value in the environment and
use it just like you see it below.
If you run into what appears to be compatibility issues between
wxWidgets and wxPython while building wxPython, be sure you are using
the wxWidgets sources included with the wxPython-src tarball or the
CVS snapshot, and not a previously installed version or a version
installed from one of the standard wxWidgets installers. With the
"unstable" releases (have a odd-numbered minor release value, where
the APIs are allowed to change) there are often significant
differences between the W.X.Y release of wxWidgets and the W.X.Y.Z
release of wxPython.
Building on Unix-like Systems (e.g. Linux and OS X)
---------------------------------------------------
These platforms are built almost the same way while in development
so I'll combine the descriptions about their build process here.
First we will build wxWidgets and install it to an out of the way
place, then do the same for wxPython.
1. Create a build directory in the main wxWidgets dir, and configure
wxWidgets. If you want to have multiple builds with different
configure options, just use different subdirectories. I normally
put the configure command in a script named ".configure" in each
build dir so I can easily blow away everything in the build dir and
rerun the script without having to remember the options I used
before::
cd $WXDIR
mkdir bld
cd bld
../configure --prefix=/opt/wx/2.7 \
--with-gtk \
--with-gnomeprint \
--with-opengl \
--enable-debug \
--enable-geometry \
--enable-graphics_ctx \
--enable-sound --with-sdl \
--enable-mediactrl \
--enable-display \
--disable-debugreport \
On OS X of course you'll want to use --with-mac instead of
--with-gtk and --with-gnomeprint.
Notice that above I used a prefix option of "/opt/wx/2.7". You can
use whatever path you want, such as a path in your HOME dir or even
one of the standard prefix paths such as /usr or /usr/local if you
like, but using /opt this way lets me easily have multiple versions
and ports of wxWidgets "installed" and makes it easy to switch
between them, without impacting any versions of wxWidgets that may
have been installed via an RPM or whatever. For the rest of the
steps below be sure to also substitute "/opt/wx/2.7" with whatever
prefix you choose for your build.
**NOTE**: Due to a recent change there is currently a dependency
problem in the multilib builds of wxWidgets on OSX, so I have
switched to using a monolithic build. That means that all of the
core wxWidgets code is placed in in one shared library instead of
several. wxPython can be used with either mode, so use whatever
suits you on Linux and etc. but use monolithic on OSX. To switch
to the monolithic build of wxWidgets just add this configure flag::
--enable-monolithic \
By default GTK 2.x will be used for the build. If you would rather
use GTK 1.2.x for some reason then you can force configure to use
it by changing the --with-gtk flag to specify it like this::
--with-gtk=1 \
To make the wxWidgets build be unicode enabled (strongly
recommended unless you are building with GTK1) then add the
following flag. When wxPython is unicode enabled then all strings
that are passed to wx functions and methods will first be converted
to unicode objects, and any 'strings' returned from wx functions
and methods will actually be unicode objects.::
--enable-unicode \
If you want to use the image and zlib libraries included with
wxWidgets instead of those already installed on your system, (for
example, to reduce dependencies on 3rd party libraries) then you
can add these flags to the configure command::
--with-libjpeg=builtin \
--with-libpng=builtin \
--with-libtiff=builtin \
--with-zlib=builtin \
2. To build and install wxWidgets you could just use the "make"
command but there are a couple other libraries besides the main
wxWidgets libs that also need to be built so again I make a script
to do it all for me so I don't forget anything. This time it is
called ".make" (I use the leading "." so when I do ``rm -r *`` in
my build dir I don't lose my scripts too.) This is what it looks
like::
make $* \
&& make -C contrib/src/gizmos $* \
&& make -C contrib/src/stc $*
So you just use .make as if it where make, but don't forget to set
the execute bit on .make first!::
.make
.make install
When it's done you should have an installed set of files under
/opt/wx/2.7 containing just wxWidgets. Now to use this version of
wxWidgets you just need to add /opt/wx/2.7/bin to the PATH and set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on OS X) to /opt/wx/2.7/lib.
3. I also have a script to help me build wxPython and it is checked in
to the CVS as wxWidgets/wxPython/b, but you probably don't want to
use it as it's very cryptic and expects that you want to run SWIG,
so if you don't have the latest patched up version of SWIG then
you'll probably get stuck. So in this document I'll just give the
raw commands instead.
We're not going to install the development version of wxPython with
these commands, so it won't impact your already installed version
of the latest release. You'll be able test with this version when
you want to, and use the installed release version the rest of the
time. If you want to install the development version please read
INSTALL.txt.
If you have more than one version of Python on your system then be
sure to use the version of Python that you want to use when running
wxPython programs to run the setup.py commands below. I'll be
using python2.5.
Make sure that the first wx-config found on the PATH is the one
belonging to the wxWidgets that you installed above, and then
change to the $WXDIR/wxPython dir and run the this command::
cd $WXDIR/wxPython
python2.5 setup.py build_ext --inplace --debug
If your new wx-config script is not on the PATH, or there is some
other version of it found first, then you can add this to the
command line to ensure your new one is used instead::
WX_CONFIG=/opt/wx/2.7/bin/wx-config
By default setup.py will assume that you built wxWidgets to use
GTK2. If you built wxWidgets to use GTK 1.2.x then you should add
this flag to the command-line::
WXPORT=gtk
Setup.py will assume by default that you are using a unicode build
of wxWidgets. If not then you can use this flag::
UNICODE=0
If you are wanting to have the source files regenerated with swig,
(only neccessary if you make modifications to the ``*.i`` files,)
then you need to turn on the USE_SWIG flag and optionally tell it
where to find the new swig executable, so add these flags::
USE_SWIG=1 SWIG=/opt/swig/bin/swig
If you get errors about being unable to find libGLU, wxGLCanvas
being undeclared, or something similar then you can add
BUILD_GLCANVAS=0 to the setup.py command line to disable the
building of the glcanvas module.
When the setup.py command is done you should have a fully populated
(but uninstalled) wx package located in your $WXDIR/wxPython/wx
directory.
4. To run code with the development version of wxPython, just set the
PYTHONPATH to the wxPython dir located in the source tree. For
example::
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/wx/2.7/lib
export PYTHONPATH=$WXDIR/wxPython
cd $WXDIR/wxPython/demo
python2.5 demo.py
OS X NOTE: Depending on your version of OS X and Python you may
need to use "pythonw" on the command line to run wxPython
applications. This version of the Python executable is part of the
Python Framework and is allowed to interact with the display. You
can also double click on a .py or a .pyw file from the finder
(assuming that the PythonLauncher app is associated with these file
extensions) and it will launch the Framework version of Python for
you. For information about creating Applicaiton Bundles of your
wxPython apps please see the wiki and the mail lists.
SOLARIS NOTE: If you get unresolved symbol errors when importing
wxPython and you are running on Solaris and building with gcc, then
you may be able to work around the problem by uncommenting a bit of
code in config.py and building again. Look for 'SunOS' in config.py
and uncomment the block containing it. The problem is that Sun's ld
does not automatically add libgcc to the link step.
Building on Windows
-------------------
The Windows builds currently require the use of Microsoft Visual C++.
Theoretically, other compilers (such as mingw32 or the Borland
compilers) can also be used but I've never done the work to make that
happen. If you want to try that then first you'll want to find out if
there are any tricks that have to be done to make Python extension
modules using that compiler, and then make a few changes to setup.py
to accommodate that. (And send the patches to me.)
The standard Python 2.3 and earlier are built with MS Visual C 6.0 and
so you must also build with MSVC 6 in order to be used with the stock
python.exe. If you woudl rather use a different version of
VisualStudio keep in mind that you'll also have to build Python and
any other extension modules that you use with that compiler because a
different version of the C runtime library is used. The stock Python
2.4 and 2.5 executables are built with MSVC 7.1, and the same rules
apply to it.
If you want to build a debuggable version of wxWidgets and wxPython you
will need to have also built a debug version of Python and any other
extension modules you need to use. You can tell if you have them
already if there is a _d in the file names, for example python_d.exe
or python25_d.dll. If you don't need to trace through the C/C++ parts
of the code with the debugger then building the normal (or hybrid)
version is fine, and you can use the regular python executables with
it.
Starting with 2.5.3.0 wxPython can be built for either the monlithic
or the multi-lib wxWidgets builds. (Monolithic means that all the
core wxWidgets code is in one DLL, and multi-lib means that the core
code is divided into multiple DLLs.) To select which one to use
specify the MONOLITHIC flag for both the wxWidgets build and the
wxPython build as shown below, setting it to either 0 or 1.
Just like the unix versions I also use some scripts to help me build
wxWidgets, but I use some non-standard stuff to do it. So if you have
bash (cygwin or probably MSYS too) or 4NT plus unix-like cat and sed
programs then there is a copy of my wxWidgets build scripts in
%WXDIR%\\wxPython\\distrib\\msw. Just copy them to
%WXDIR%\\build\\msw and you can use them to do your build, otherwise
you can do everything by hand as described below. But if you do work
by hand and something doesn't seem to be working correctly please
refer to the build scripts to see what may need to be done
differently.
The \*.btm files are for 4NT and the others are for bash. They are::
.make/.make.btm Builds the main lib and the needed contribs
.mymake/.mymake.btm Builds just one lib, used by .make
.makesetup.mk A makefile that will copy and edit setup.h
as needed for the different types of builds
Okay. Here's what you've been waiting for, the instructions! Adapt
accordingly if you are using the bash shell.
1. Set an environment variable to the root of the wxWidgets source
tree. This is used by the makefiles::
set WXWIN=%WXDIR%
2. Copy setup0.h to setup.h::
cd %WXDIR%\include\wx\msw
copy setup0.h setup.h
3. Edit %WXDIR%\\include\\wx\\msw\\setup.h and change a few settings::
wxUSE_DEBUGREPORT 0
wxUSE_EXCEPTIONS 0
wxUSE_DIALUP_MANAGER 0
wxUSE_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT 1
wxUSE_GLCANVAS 1
wxUSE_POSTSCRIPT 1
wxUSE_DIB_FOR_BITMAP 1
If you are using my build scripts then a few more settings will be
changed automatically and then a copy of setup.h is placed in a
subdir of %WXWIN%\\lib\vc_dll. If you are doing it by hand and
making a UNICODE build, then also change these::
wxUSE_UNICODE 1
wxUSE_UNICODE_MSLU 1
If you are doing a "hybrid" build (which is the same as the
binaries that I release) then also change these::
wxUSE_MEMORY_TRACING 0
wxUSE_DEBUG_CONTEXT 0
4. Make sure that %WXDIR%\\lib\\vc_dll directory is on the PATH. The
wxWidgets DLLs will end up there as part of the build and so you'll
need it on the PATH for them to be found at runtime.
5. Change to the %WXDIR%\\build\\msw directory
cd %WXDIR%\\build\\msw
6. If using my scripts then use the .make.btm command to build
wxWidgets. It needs one command-line parameter which controls what
kind of build(s) to do. Use one of the following::
debug Build debug version
hybrid Build hybrid version
both Both debug and hybrid
debug-uni Build a debug unicode library
hybrid-uni Hybrid unicode (see the pattern yet? ;-)
both-uni and finally both unicode libraries
For example::
.make hybrid
You can also pass additional command line parameters as needed and
they will all be passed on to the nmake commands, for example to
clean up the build::
.make hybrid clean
If *not* using my scripts then you can do it by hand by directly
executing nmake with a bunch of extra command line parameters.
The base set are::
nmake -f makefile.vc OFFICIAL_BUILD=1 SHARED=1 MONOLITHIC=0 USE_OPENGL=1 USE_GDIPLUS=1
If doing a debug build then add::
BUILD=debug
otherwise add these::
DEBUG_FLAG=1 CXXFLAGS=/D__NO_VC_CRTDBG__ WXDEBUGFLAG=h BUILD=release
If doing a Unicode build then add these flags::
UNICODE=1 MSLU=1
Now, from the %WXDIR%\\build\\msw directory run nmake with your
selection of command-line flags as described above.
7. When that is all done it will have built the main wxWidgets DLLs
and also some of the contribs DLLs. There should be a ton of DLLs
and lots of lib files and other stuff in %WXDIR%\\lib\\vc_dll.
8. Building wxPython on Windows is very similar to doing it for the
unix systems. We're not going to install the development version
of wxPython with these commands, so it won't impact your already
installed version of the latest release. You'll be able to test
with this version when you want to, and use the installed release
version the rest of the time. If you ever do want to install the
development version please refer to INSTALL.txt.
Change to the %WXDIR%\\wxPython dir and run the this command,
making sure that you use the version of python that you want to
build for (if you have more than one on your system) and to match
the MONOLITHIC flag with how you built wxWidgets::
cd %WXDIR%\wxPython
python setup.py build_ext --inplace MONOLITHIC=0
If you are wanting to have the source files regenerated with swig,
(only neccessary if you make modifications to the ``*.i`` files,)
then you need to turn on the USE_SWIG flag and optionally tell it
where to find the new swig executable, so add these flags::
USE_SWIG=1 SWIG=e:\\projects\\SWIG-1.2.29\\swig.exe
If you built a Unicode version of wxWidgets and want to also build
the Unicode version of wxPython then add this flag::
UNICODE=1
If you have a debug version of Python and wxWidgets and want to
build a debug version of wxPython too, add the --debug flag to the
command line. You should then end up with a set of ``*_d.pyd``
files in the wx package and you'll have to run ``python_d.exe`` to
use them. The debug and hybrid(release) versions can coexist.
When the setup.py command is done you should have fully populated
wxPython and wx packages locally in %WXDIR%/wxPython/wxPython and
%WXDIR%/wxPython/wx, with all the extension modules (``*.pyd``
files) located in the wx package.
9. To run code with the development version of wxPython, just set the
PYTHONPATH to the wxPython dir in the CVS tree. For example::
set PYTHONPATH=%WXDIR%\wxPython
cd %WXDIR\wxPython\demo
python demo.py