Building

General information about building the Octave source for different operating systems.

General steps

Build from the development repository	Build from a release
Install all build dependencies (see below).
hg clone https://www.octave.org/hg/octave && \ cd octave && \ ./bootstrap	wget https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/octave/octave-9.2.0.tar.gz && \ tar -xzf octave-9.2.0.tar.gz
mkdir .build && \ cd .build && \ ./../configure --prefix=$HOME/my_octave && \ make -j2 && \ make check && \ make install

• Linux
  • Arch Linux
  • Debian (and Debian-based)
  • RedHat (and RedHat-based)
  • Slackware
• macOS
• Windows
  • Building on Cygwin platform
  • MXE cross compiler

We try to keep build instructions up to date in the source tree. Please clone using Mercurial or download it to see the README.

There are also instructions in the manual.

Dependencies

Critical
Recommended
Not critical

Build tools

Dependency	Description	License / Copyright
C++, C, and Fortran compilers	Compiling the source code	GNU GPL v3.0
GNU Make	Makefile processor	GNU GPL v3.0
Unix utilities: gawk, gperf, less, ncurses	Miscellaneous tasks	GNU GPL v3.0
Bison	Parser generator	GNU GPL v3.0
Flex	Lexical analyzer	The Flex project
Autoconf	Software configuration	GNU GPL v3.0
Automake	Makefile generator	GNU GPL v3.0
Libtool	Dependency of automake	Free Software Foundation

Task	Dependency	Description	License / Copyright	Version	Level
Documentation tools	epstool	Epstool is a utility to create or extract preview images in EPS files, fix bounding boxes and convert to bitmaps.	GNU GPL v2.0
	FTGL	FTGL is a free cross-platform Open Source C++ library that uses Freetype2 to simplify rendering fonts in OpenGL applications.	Provided "as is" -- various authors
	GL2PS	GL2PS is a C library providing high quality vector output for any OpenGL application.	GNU LGPL v2.0
	pstoedit	Translates PostScript and PDF graphics into other vector formats.	GNU GPL v2.0
	Texi2HTML	Perl script which converts Texinfo source files to HTML output.	GNU GPL v3.0
	Texinfo	Documentation system that uses a single source to produce both on-line information and printed output.	GNU GPL v3.0
	TeX Live generic	Mixed bag of generic macro packages and fonts.	Freely redistributable as defined by the Free Software Foundation
	TeX Live	Compiler for TeX doumentation.	Freely redistributable as defined by the Free Software Foundation
	transfig	Tans­lates fig­ures gen­er­ated by xfig to a large va­ri­ety of for­mats.	BSD Style Li­cense
External tools	BLAS	Basic Linear Algebra Subroutine library	Free - proper attribution request
	LAPACK	Linear Algebra Package	Free - proper attribution request
	PCRE	Perl Compatible Regular Expression library	Free
	GNU Readline	Command-line editing library	GNU GPL v3.0
	ARPACK	Solution of large-scale eigenvalue problems	BSD like - various authors
	cURL	Library for transferring data with URL syntax	Free Software -- main author	> 7.32.00
	FFTW3	Library for computing discrete Fourier transforms	MIT -- GNU GPL v2.0
	FLTK	Portable GUI toolkit	GNU GPL v2.0 with static linking exception
	fontconfig	Library for configuring and customizing font access	Provided "as is" -- various authors
	FreeType	Portable font engine	compatible with GNU GPL v3.0
	GLPK	GNU Linear Programming Kit	GNU GPL v3.0
	gnuplot	Interactive graphics program	Provided "as is" -- various authors
	GraphicsMagick++	Image processing library	various -- integrates many third-party libs	> 1.3.18
	HDF5	Library for manipulating portable data files	BSD - like
	OpenGL	API for portable 2D and 3D graphics	Free specs -- license is driver dependent
	Qhull	Computational geometry library	Free software -- specific
	QRUPDATE	QR factorization updating library	GNU GPL v3.0
	SuiteSparse	Sparse matrix factorization library	Main author
	zlib	Data compression library	Provided "as is" -- various authors