Building with configure (*nix including GNU/Linux)¶
If you are going to build Universal-ctags on a popular GNU/Linux distribution, you can install the tools and libraries that Universal-ctags requires (or may use) as packages. See GNU/Linux distributions about the packages.
Like most Autotools-based projects, you need to do:
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --prefix=/where/you/want # defaults to /usr/local
$ make
$ make install # may require extra privileges depending on where to install
After installation the ctags executable will be in $prefix/bin/.
autogen.sh runs autoreconf internally. If you use a (binary oriented) GNU/Linux distribution, autoreconf may be part of the autoconf package. In addition you may have to install automake and/or pkg-config, too.
GNU/Linux distributions¶
Before running ./autogen.sh, install some packages.
On Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu), do:
$ sudo apt install \
gcc make \
pkg-config autoconf automake \
python3-docutils \
libseccomp-dev \
libjansson-dev \
libyaml-dev \
libxml2-dev
On Fedora systems, do:
$ sudo dnf install \
gcc make \
pkgconfig autoconf automake \
python3-docutils \
libseccomp-devel \
jansson-devel \
libyaml-devel \
libxml2-devel
Changing the executable’s name¶
On some systems, like certain BSDs, there is already a ‘ctags’ program in the base
system, so it is somewhat inconvenient to have the same name for
Universal-ctags. During the configure
stage you can now change
the name of the created executable.
To add a prefix ‘ex’ which will result in ‘ctags’ being renamed to ‘exctags’:
$ ./configure --program-prefix=ex
To completely change the program’s name run the following:
$ ./configure --program-transform-name='s/ctags/my_ctags/; s/etags/myemacs_tags/'
Please remember there is also an ‘etags’ installed alongside ‘ctags’ which you may also want to rename as shown above.