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<div class="sidemenu"><ul id="lxml-section"><li><span class="section title">lxml</span><ul class="menu foreign" id="index-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="index.html">lxml</a><ul class="submenu"><li class="menu item"><a href="index.html#introduction">Introduction</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="index.html#support-the-project">Support the project</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="index.html#documentation">Documentation</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="index.html#download">Download</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="index.html#mailing-list">Mailing list</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="index.html#bug-tracker">Bug tracker</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="index.html#license">License</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="index.html#old-versions">Old Versions</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="index.html#legal-notice-for-donations">Legal Notice for Donations</a></li></ul></li></ul><ul class="menu foreign" id="intro-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="intro.html">Why lxml?</a><ul class="submenu"><li class="menu item"><a href="intro.html#motto">Motto</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="intro.html#aims">Aims</a></li></ul></li></ul><ul class="menu foreign" id="installation-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="installation.html">Installing lxml</a><ul class="submenu"><li class="menu item"><a href="installation.html#requirements">Requirements</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="installation.html#installation">Installation</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="installation.html#building-lxml-from-sources">Building lxml from sources</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="installation.html#using-lxml-with-python-libxml2">Using lxml with python-libxml2</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="installation.html#ms-windows">MS Windows</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="installation.html#macos-x">MacOS-X</a></li></ul></li></ul><ul class="menu foreign" id="performance-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="performance.html">Benchmarks and Speed</a><ul class="submenu"><li class="menu item"><a href="performance.html#general-notes">General notes</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="performance.html#how-to-read-the-timings">How to read the timings</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="performance.html#parsing-and-serialising">Parsing and Serialising</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="performance.html#the-elementtree-api">The ElementTree API</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="performance.html#xpath">XPath</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="performance.html#a-longer-example">A longer example</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="performance.html#lxml-objectify">lxml.objectify</a></li></ul></li></ul><ul class="menu foreign" id="compatibility-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="compatibility.html">ElementTree compatibility of lxml.etree</a></li></ul><ul class="menu foreign" id="FAQ-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="FAQ.html">lxml FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions</a><ul class="submenu"><li class="menu item"><a href="FAQ.html#general-questions">General Questions</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="FAQ.html#installation">Installation</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="FAQ.html#contributing">Contributing</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="FAQ.html#bugs">Bugs</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="FAQ.html#id1">Threading</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="FAQ.html#parsing-and-serialisation">Parsing and Serialisation</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="FAQ.html#xpath-and-document-traversal">XPath and Document Traversal</a></li></ul></li></ul></li></ul><ul id="Developing with lxml-section"><li><span class="section title">Developing with lxml</span><ul class="menu foreign" id="tutorial-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="tutorial.html">The lxml.etree Tutorial</a><ul class="submenu"><li class="menu item"><a href="tutorial.html#the-element-class">The Element class</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="tutorial.html#the-elementtree-class">The ElementTree class</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="tutorial.html#parsing-from-strings-and-files">Parsing from strings and files</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="tutorial.html#namespaces">Namespaces</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="tutorial.html#the-e-factory">The E-factory</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="tutorial.html#elementpath">ElementPath</a></li></ul></li></ul><ul class="menu foreign" id="api index-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="api/index.html">API reference</a></li></ul><ul class="menu foreign" id="api-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="api.html">APIs specific to lxml.etree</a><ul class="submenu"><li class="menu item"><a href="api.html#lxml-etree">lxml.etree</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="api.html#other-element-apis">Other Element APIs</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="api.html#trees-and-documents">Trees and Documents</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="api.html#iteration">Iteration</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="api.html#error-handling-on-excepti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 to:</a></li></ul></li></ul></li><li><a href="http://lxml.de/sitemap.html">Sitemap</a></li></ul></div><h1 class="title">How to build lxml from source</h1>
  12
  13 <p>To build lxml from source, you need libxml2 and libxslt properly
  14 installed, <em>including the header files</em>.  These are likely shipped in
  15 separate <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">-dev</span></tt> or <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">-devel</span></tt> packages like <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">libxml2-dev</span></tt>, which
  16 you must install before trying to build lxml.  The build process also
  17 requires <a class="reference external" href="http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools">setuptools</a>.  The lxml source distribution comes with a
  18 script called <tt class="docutils literal">ez_setup.py</tt> that can be used to install them.</p>
  19 <div class="contents topic" id="contents">
  20 <p class="topic-title first">Contents</p>
  21 <ul class="simple">
  22 <li><a class="reference internal" href="#cython" id="id3">Cython</a></li>
  23 <li><a class="reference internal" href="#github-git-and-hg" id="id4">Github, git and hg</a></li>
  24 <li><a class="reference internal" href="#id2" id="id5">Setuptools</a></li>
  25 <li><a class="reference internal" href="#running-the-tests-and-reporting-errors" id="id6">Running the tests and reporting errors</a></li>
  26 <li><a class="reference internal" href="#building-an-egg" id="id7">Building an egg</a></li>
  27 <li><a class="reference internal" href="#building-lxml-on-macos-x" id="id8">Building lxml on MacOS-X</a></li>
  28 <li><a class="reference internal" href="#static-linking-on-windows" id="id9">Static linking on Windows</a></li>
  29 <li><a class="reference internal" href="#building-debian-packages-from-svn-sources" id="id10">Building Debian packages from SVN sources</a></li>
  30 </ul>
  31 </div>
  32 <div class="section" id="cython">
  33 <h1>Cython</h1>
  34 <p>The lxml.etree and lxml.objectify modules are written in <a class="reference external" href="http://www.cython.org">Cython</a>.
  35 Since we distribute the Cython-generated .c files with lxml releases,
  36 however, you do not need Cython to build lxml from the normal release
  37 sources.  We even encourage you to <em>not install Cython</em> for a normal
  38 release build, as the generated C code can vary quite heavily between
  39 Cython versions, which may or may not generate correct code for lxml.
  40 The pre-generated release sources were tested and therefore are known
  41 to work.</p>
  42 <p>So, if you want a reliable build of lxml, we suggest to a) use a
  43 source release of lxml and b) disable or uninstall Cython for the
  44 build.</p>
  45 <p><em>Only</em> if you are interested in building lxml from a checkout of the
  46 developer sources (e.g. to test a bug fix that has not been release
  47 yet) or if you want to be an lxml developer, then you do need a
  48 working Cython installation.  You can use <a class="reference external" href="http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall">EasyInstall</a> to install it:</p>
  49 <pre class="literal-block">
  50 easy_install "Cython&gt;=0.14.1"
  51 </pre>
  52 <p>lxml currently requires Cython 0.14.1, later release versions should
  53 work as well.</p>
  54 </div>
  55 <div class="section" id="github-git-and-hg">
  56 <h1>Github, git and hg</h1>
  57 <p>The lxml package is developed in a repository on <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/lxml/">Github</a> using
  58 <a class="reference external" href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> and the <a class="reference external" href="http://hg-git.github.com/">hg-git</a> plugin.  You can retrieve the current
  59 developer version using:</p>
  60 <pre class="literal-block">
  61 hg clone git://github.com/lxml/lxml.git lxml
  62 </pre>
  63 <p>This will create a directory <tt class="docutils literal">lxml</tt> and download the source into it,
  64 including the complete development history.  Don't be afraid, the
  65 download is fairly quick.  You can also browse the <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/lxml/lxml">lxml repository</a>
  66 through the web.</p>
  67 </div>
  68 <div class="section" id="id2">
  69 <h1>Setuptools</h1>
  70 <p>Usually, building lxml is done through setuptools.  Clone the source
  71 repository as described above (or download the <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/lxml/lxml/tarball/master">source tar-ball</a> and
  72 unpack it) and then type:</p>
  73 <pre class="literal-block">
  74 python setup.py build
  75 </pre>
  76 <p>or:</p>
  77 <pre class="literal-block">
  78 python setup.py bdist_egg
  79 </pre>
  80 <p>If you want to test lxml from the source directory, it is better to build it
  81 in-place like this:</p>
  82 <pre class="literal-block">
  83 python setup.py  build_ext -i
  84 </pre>
  85 <p>or, in Unix-like environments:</p>
  86 <pre class="literal-block">
  87 make
  88 </pre>
  89 <p>If you get errors about missing header files (e.g. <tt class="docutils literal">Python.h</tt> or
  90 <tt class="docutils literal">libxml/xmlversion.h</tt>) then you need to make sure the development
  91 packages of Python, libxml2 and libxslt are properly installed.  On
  92 Linux distributions, they are usually called something like
  93 <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">libxml2-dev</span></tt> or <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">libxslt-devel</span></tt>.  If these packages were
  94 installed in non-standard places, try passing the following option to
  95 setup.py to make sure the right config is found:</p>
  96 <pre class="literal-block">
  97 python setup.py build --with-xslt-config=/path/to/xslt-config
  98 </pre>
  99 <p>If this doesn't help, you may have to add the location of the header
 100 files to the include path like:</p>
 101 <pre class="literal-block">
 102 python setup.py build_ext -i  -I /usr/include/libxml2
 103 </pre>
 104 <p>where the file is in <tt class="docutils literal">/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/xmlversion.h</tt></p>
 105 <p>To use lxml.etree in-place, you can place lxml's <tt class="docutils literal">src</tt> directory on your
 106 Python module search path (PYTHONPATH) and then import <tt class="docutils literal">lxml.etree</tt> to play
 107 with it:</p>
 108 <pre class="literal-block">
 109 # cd lxml
 110 # PYTHONPATH=src python
 111 Python 2.5.1
 112 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 113 &gt;&gt;&gt; from lxml import etree
 114 &gt;&gt;&gt;
 115 </pre>
 116 <p>To make sure everything gets recompiled cleanly after changes, you can
 117 run <tt class="docutils literal">make clean</tt> or delete the file <tt class="docutils literal">src/lxml/etree.c</tt>.  Distutils
 118 do not automatically pick up changes that affect files other than the
 119 main file <tt class="docutils literal">src/lxml/etree.pyx</tt>.</p>
 120 </div>
 121 <div class="section" id="running-the-tests-and-reporting-errors">
 122 <h1>Running the tests and reporting errors</h1>
 123 <p>The source distribution (tgz) and the source repository contain a test
 124 suite for lxml.  You can run it from the top-level directory:</p>
 125 <pre class="literal-block">
 126 python test.py
 127 </pre>
 128 <p>Note that the test script only tests the in-place build (see distutils
 129 building above), as it searches the <tt class="docutils literal">src</tt> directory.  You can use the
 130 following one-step command to trigger an in-place build and test it:</p>
 131 <pre class="literal-block">
 132 make test
 133 </pre>
 134 <p>This also runs the ElementTree and cElementTree compatibility tests.  To call
 135 them separately, make sure you have lxml on your PYTHONPATH first, then run:</p>
 136 <pre class="literal-block">
 137 python selftest.py
 138 </pre>
 139 <p>and:</p>
 140 <pre class="literal-block">
 141 python selftest2.py
 142 </pre>
 143 <p>If the tests give failures, errors, or worse, segmentation faults, we'd really
 144 like to know.  Please contact us on the <a class="reference external" href="http://lxml.de/mailinglist/">mailing list</a>, and please specify
 145 the version of lxml, libxml2, libxslt and Python you were using, as well as
 146 your operating system type (Linux, Windows, MacOs, ...).</p>
 147 </div>
 148 <div class="section" id="building-an-egg">
 149 <h1>Building an egg</h1>
 150 <p>This is the procedure to make an lxml egg for your platform (assuming
 151 that you have <a class="reference external" href="http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools">setuptools</a> installed):</p>
 152 <ul class="simple">
 153 <li>Download the lxml-x.y.tar.gz release.  This contains the pregenerated C so
 154 that you can be sure you build exactly from the release sources.  Unpack
 155 them and cd into the resulting directory.</li>
 156 <li>python setup.py build</li>
 157 <li>If you're on a unixy platform, cd into <tt class="docutils literal">build/lib.your.platform</tt> and strip
 158 any <tt class="docutils literal">.so</tt> file you find there.  This reduces the size of the egg
 159 considerably.</li>
 160 <li><tt class="docutils literal">python setup.py bdist_egg</tt></li>
 161 </ul>
 162 <p>This will put the egg into the <tt class="docutils literal">dist</tt> directory.</p>
 163 </div>
 164 <div class="section" id="building-lxml-on-macos-x">
 165 <h1>Building lxml on MacOS-X</h1>
 166 <p>Apple regularly ships new system releases with horribly outdated
 167 system libraries.  This is specifically the case for libxml2 and
 168 libxslt, where the system provided versions are too old to build lxml.</p>
 169 <p>While the Unix environment in MacOS-X makes it relatively easy to
 170 install Unix/Linux style package management tools and new software, it
 171 actually seems to be hard to get libraries set up for exclusive usage
 172 that MacOS-X ships in an older version.  Alternative distributions
 173 (like macports) install their libraries in addition to the system
 174 libraries, but the compiler and the runtime loader on MacOS still sees
 175 the system libraries before the new libraries.  This can lead to
 176 undebuggable crashes where the newer library seems to be loaded but
 177 the older system library is used.</p>
 178 <p>Apple discourages static building against libraries, which would help
 179 working around this problem.  Apple does not ship static library
 180 binaries with its system and several package management systems follow
 181 this decision.  Therefore, building static binaries requires building
 182 the dependencies first.  The <tt class="docutils literal">setup.py</tt> script does this
 183 automatically when you call it like this:</p>
 184 <pre class="literal-block">
 185 python setup.py build --static-deps
 186 </pre>
 187 <p>This will download and build the latest versions of libxml2 and
 188 libxslt from the official FTP download site.  If you want to use
 189 specific versions, or want to prevent any online access, you can
 190 download both <tt class="docutils literal">tar.gz</tt> release files yourself, place them into a
 191 subdirectory <tt class="docutils literal">libs</tt> in the lxml distribution, and call <tt class="docutils literal">setup.py</tt>
 192 with the desired target versions like this:</p>
 193 <pre class="literal-block">
 194 python setup.py build --static-deps \
 195        --libxml2-version=2.7.3 \
 196        --libxslt-version=1.1.24 \
 197
 198 sudo python setup.py install
 199 </pre>
 200 <p>Instead of <tt class="docutils literal">build</tt>, you can use any target, like <tt class="docutils literal">bdist_egg</tt> if
 201 you want to use setuptools to build an installable egg.</p>
 202 <p>Note that this also works with <a class="reference external" href="http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall">EasyInstall</a>.  Since you can't pass
 203 command line options in this case, you have to use an environment
 204 variable instead:</p>
 205 <pre class="literal-block">
 206 STATIC_DEPS=true easy_install lxml
 207 </pre>
 208 <p>Some machines may require an additional run with "sudo" to install the
 209 package into the Python package directory:</p>
 210 <pre class="literal-block">
 211 STATIC_DEPS=true sudo easy_install lxml
 212 </pre>
 213 <p>The <tt class="docutils literal">STATICBUILD</tt> environment variable is handled equivalently to
 214 the <tt class="docutils literal">STATIC_DEPS</tt> variable, but is used by some other extension
 215 packages, too.</p>
 216 </div>
 217 <div class="section" id="static-linking-on-windows">
 218 <h1>Static linking on Windows</h1>
 219 <p>Most operating systems have proper package management that makes installing
 220 current versions of libxml2 and libxslt easy.  The most famous exception is
 221 Microsoft Windows, which entirely lacks these capabilities.  It can therefore
 222 be interesting to statically link the external libraries into lxml.etree to
 223 avoid having to install them separately.</p>
 224 <p>Download lxml and all required libraries to the same directory.  The iconv,
 225 libxml2, libxslt, and zlib libraries are all available from the ftp site
 226 <a class="reference external" href="ftp://ftp.zlatkovic.com/pub/libxml/">ftp://ftp.zlatkovic.com/pub/libxml/</a>.</p>
 227 <p>Your directory should now have the following files in it (although most likely
 228 different versions):</p>
 229 <pre class="literal-block">
 230 iconv-1.9.1.win32.zip
 231 libxml2-2.6.23.win32.zip
 232 libxslt-1.1.15.win32.zip
 233 lxml-1.0.0.tgz
 234 zlib-1.2.3.win32.zip
 235 </pre>
 236 <p>Now extract each of those files in the <em>same</em> directory.  This should give you
 237 something like this:</p>
 238 <pre class="literal-block">
 239 iconv-1.9.1.win32/
 240 iconv-1.9.1.win32.zip
 241 libxml2-2.6.23.win32/
 242 libxml2-2.6.23.win32.zip
 243 libxslt-1.1.15.win32/
 244 libxslt-1.1.15.win32.zip
 245 lxml-1.0.0/
 246 lxml-1.0.0.tgz
 247 zlib-1.2.3.win32/
 248 zlib-1.2.3.win32.zip
 249 </pre>
 250 <p>Go to the lxml directory and edit the file <tt class="docutils literal">setup.py</tt>.  There should
 251 be a section near the top that looks like this:</p>
 252 <pre class="literal-block">
 253 STATIC_INCLUDE_DIRS = []
 254 STATIC_LIBRARY_DIRS = []
 255 STATIC_CFLAGS = []
 256 </pre>
 257 <p>Change this section to something like this, but take care to use the correct
 258 version numbers:</p>
 259 <pre class="literal-block">
 260 STATIC_INCLUDE_DIRS = [
 261        "..\\libxml2-2.6.23.win32\\include",
 262        "..\\libxslt-1.1.15.win32\\include",
 263        "..\\zlib-1.2.3.win32\\include",
 264        "..\\iconv-1.9.1.win32\\include"
 265        ]
 266
 267 STATIC_LIBRARY_DIRS = [
 268        "..\\libxml2-2.6.23.win32\\lib",
 269        "..\\libxslt-1.1.15.win32\\lib",
 270        "..\\zlib-1.2.3.win32\\lib",
 271        "..\\iconv-1.9.1.win32\\lib"
 272        ]
 273
 274 STATIC_CFLAGS = []
 275 </pre>
 276 <p>Add any CFLAGS you might consider useful to the third list.  Now you
 277 should be able to pass the <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">--static</span></tt> option to setup.py and
 278 everything should work well.  Try calling:</p>
 279 <pre class="literal-block">
 280 python setup.py bdist_wininst --static
 281 </pre>
 282 <p>This will create a windows installer in the <tt class="docutils literal">pkg</tt> directory.</p>
 283 </div>
 284 <div class="section" id="building-debian-packages-from-svn-sources">
 285 <h1>Building Debian packages from SVN sources</h1>
 286 <p><a class="reference external" href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.lxml.devel/1239/focus=1249">Andreas Pakulat</a> proposed the following approach.</p>
 287 <ul class="simple">
 288 <li><tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">apt-get</span> source lxml</tt></li>
 289 <li>remove the unpacked directory</li>
 290 <li>tar.gz the lxml SVN version and replace the orig.tar.gz that lies in the
 291 directory</li>
 292 <li>check md5sum of created tar.gz file and place new sum and size in dsc file</li>
 293 <li>do <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">dpkg-source</span> <span class="pre">-x</span> <span class="pre">lxml-[VERSION].dsc</span></tt> and cd into the newly created directory</li>
 294 <li>run <tt class="docutils literal">dch <span class="pre">-i</span></tt> and add a comment like "use trunk version", this will
 295 increase the debian version number so apt/dpkg won't get confused</li>
 296 <li>run <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">dpkg-buildpackage</span> <span class="pre">-rfakeroot</span> <span class="pre">-us</span> <span class="pre">-uc</span></tt> to build the package</li>
 297 </ul>
 298 <p>In case <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">dpkg-buildpackage</span></tt> tells you that some dependecies are missing, you
 299 can either install them manually or run <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">apt-get</span> <span class="pre">build-dep</span> lxml</tt>.</p>
 300 <p>That will give you .deb packages in the parent directory which can be
 301 installed using <tt class="docutils literal">dpkg <span class="pre">-i</span></tt>.</p>
 302 </div>
 303 </div>
 304 <div class="footer">
 305 <hr class="footer" />
 306 Generated on: 2012-07-31.
 307
 308 </div>
 309 </body>
 310 </html>