Building libprojectM

Building the projectM core library

The following build instructions apply to the most recently released projectM sources.

Important note on build tool changes in 4.0

Older projectM releases (up to 3.1.12, released in 2020) used autoconf/automake or native project files for building. This is no longer supported and all build files have been replaced with CMake build scripts that can be used on all platforms. If you need to build one of these old releases, please refer to the build instructions included in the top-level dir of the respective source release. This page is only valid for releases of lipbprojectM 4.0 or later.

For more detailed instructions and other operating systems, skip below the Linux quick start guide.

Quick Start for Linux (Debian / Ubuntu)

Install the build tools and dependencies

Mandatory packages:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake libgl1-mesa-dev mesa-common-dev libglm-dev

Optional packages for additional features:

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev # for building the integrated developer test UI
sudo apt install llvm-dev # for using the experimental LLVM Jit
sudo apt install ninja # To build projectM with Ninja instead of make

Download the projectM sources

If you want to use a stable version of projectM, download the latest release from the Releases page on GitHub and unpack it. You can then skip to the next step.

If you prefer a bleeding-edge version or want to modify the code, clone the Git repository:

sudo apt install git # Probably already installed
git clone https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm.git /path/to/local/repo
cd /path/to/local/repo
git fetch --all --tags

Build and install projectM

Replace /usr/local with your preferred installation prefix.

Configure the project

sudo apt install cmake
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local ..

To generate Ninja scripts instead of Makefiles, add -GNinja to the above command.

Build and install

These commands will build projectM and install it to /usr/local or the configured installation prefix set in the step before:

cmake --build . -- -j && sudo cmake --build . --target install 

Note: You won't need to use sudo if the install prefix is writeable by your non-privileged user.

Test projectM

You can't directly run libprojectM on its own. For development testing, the old pre-4.0 SDL UI is still available and can be enabled using -DENABLE_SDL_UI=ON via the CMake configuration command.

After building, you can run the SDL test UI directly from your build tree. It will not be installed alongside the library and headers. All end-user applications are available in separate repositories.

Dependencies

Depending on the OS/distribution and packaging system, libraries might be split into separate packages with binaries and development files. To build projectM, both binaries and development files need to be installed.

General build dependencies for all platforms:

• A working build toolchain.
• CMake: Used to generate platform-specific build files.
• OpenGL: 3D graphics library. Used to render the visualizations.
• or GLES3: OpenGL libraries for embedded systems, version 3. Required to build projectM on Android devices, Raspberry Pi, Emscripten and the Universal Windows Platform.
• glm: OpenGL Mathematics library. Optional, will use a bundled version with autotools or if not installed.
• SDL2: Simple Directmedia Layer. Version 2.0.5 or higher is required to build the test UI.
• LLVM: Low-Level Virtual Machine. Optional and experimental, used to speed up preset execution by leveraging the LLVM JIT compiler.

Only relevant for Windows:

• vcpkg: C++ Library Manager for Windows. Optional, but recommended to install the aforementioned library dependencies.
• GLEW: The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library. Only required if using CMake to configure the build, the pre-created solutions use a bundled copy of GLEW.

NuGet is no longer supported.

Building on Linux and macOS

Installing dependencies

• Linux distributions will have packages available for most (if not all) required libraries. The package names and commands to install them vary widely between distributions (and even versions of the same distribution). Please refer to the documentation of your build OS on how to find and install the required libraries.
• On *BSD, install the appropriate Ports with pkg install.
• On macOS, using Homebrew is the recommended way of installing any dependencies not supplied by Xcode.

Building with CMake

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❗ IMPORTANT NOTE: Currently, CMake build support is still in active development and considered unfinished. It is working and produces running binaries, but there are still some features, build internals and whole targets missing. While testing the CMake build files on any platform and feedback on this is strongly encouraged, CMake-based builds should not yet be used in any production environment until this message is gone.

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The steps documented below are a bare minimum quickstart guide on how to build and install the project. If you want to configure the build to your needs, require more in-depth information about the build process and available tweaks, or on how to use libprojectM in your own CMake-based projects, see BUILDING-cmake.md.

Using CMake is the recommended and future-proof way of building projectM. CMake is a platform-independent tool that is able to generate files for multiple build systems and toolsets while using only a single set of build instructions. CMake support is still new and in development, but will replace the other project files (automake/autoconf scripts, Visual Studio solutions and Xcode projects) in this repository once mature and stable.

Building the project with CMake requires two steps:

• Configure the build and generate project files.
• Build and install the project using the selected build tools.

Note: When building with CMake, the build directory should always be separate from the source directory. Generating the build files directly inside the source tree is possible, but strongly discouraged. Using a subdirectory, e.g. cmake-build inside the source directory is fine though.

This documentation only covers project-specific information. CMake is way too versatile and feature-rich to cover any possible platform- and toolset-specific configuration details here. If you are not experienced in using CMake, please first read the official CMake documentation (at least the User Interaction Guide) for basic usage instructions.

Configure the build

Configuring a non-debug build with default options and install prefix (/usr/local) can be done with these commands, building in a subdirectory inside the source directory:

cd /path/to/source
mkdir cmake-build
cd cmake-build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..

CMake will check all required dependencies and display any errors. If configuration was successful, a summary of the build configuration is printed and CMake should display a Generating done line. The project is now ready to build.

Compile and install the project

Depending on your generator choice, you can use your selected toolset as usual to build and install projectM:

• With Unix Makefiles, run make && sudo make install.
• With Ninja, run ninja && sudo ninja install.
• With Xcode, select the appropriate target and configuration in Xcode and build it, or INSTALL to install the project.

You can also use CMake's build mode to run the selected toolset and build any specified target. CMake knows which command to call and which parameters to pass, so the syntax works on all platforms with all generators. If you've already set the top-level build directory as working directory, simply pass . as /path/to/build/dir:

cmake --build /path/to/build/dir --config Release
sudo cmake --build /path/to/build/dir --config Release --target install

If you don't need root permissions to install running the second command without sudo is sufficient.

If you want to provide arguments directly to the toolset command, add -- at the end of the CMake command line followed by any additional arguments. CMake will pass these unchanged and unchecked to the subcommand:

cmake --build /path/to/build/dir --config Release -- -j 4

Building on Windows

To build the projectM library and the SDL-based standalone application, CMake must be used to create the project files first. Using vcpkg to pull in the build dependencies is highly recommended, as CMake can't use NuGet (NuGet pulls in dependencies using the project files, while CMake requires the libraries before creating the project files).

Installing the dependencies with vcpkg

As stated above, using vcpkg is the easiest way to get the required dependencies. First, install vcpkg from GitHub by following the official guide. Then install the following packages for your desired architecture (called "triplet"):

• glew
• sdl2

The glew package will also pull in the opengl libraries.

Example to install the libraries for the x64 architecture, run from a Visual Studio command prompt:

vcpkg install glew:x64-windows sdl2:x64-windows

Creating the Visual Studio solution

CMake provides separate generators for different Visual Studio versions. Newer CMake versions will support recent Visual Studio releases, but may remove generators for older ones. To get a list of available generators from the command line, use the -G switch without an argument. The CMake GUI will present you a dropdown list you can easily select from.

To set the build architecture in Visual Studio builds, use the -A switch and specify either Win32 or X64 as the argument. If you want to build for both architectures, create separate build directories and configure them accordingly.

To make CMake aware of the installed vcpkg packages, simply use the provided toolchain file when configuring the projectM build by pointing CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE to it.

Here is a full command line example to create a Visual Studio 2019 solution for X64:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A "X64" -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="<path to vcpkg>/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake" -S "<path to source dir>" -B "<path to build dir>"

If you use the CMake GUI, check the "Specify toolchain file for cross-compiling" option in the first page of the configuration assistant, then select the above vcpkg.cmake file on the second page.

Another option is to open the project folder in a recent Visual Studio version as a CMake project and configure CMake using Visual Studio's JSON-based settings file.

Building the solution

To build the project, open the generated solution in Visual Studio and build it like any other solution. Each time the CMake files are changed, Visual Studio will automatically regenerate the CMake build files and reload the solution before continuing the build. Be aware that in old Visual Studio versions (2015 and earlier) the reload-and-continue might not work properly.

You can also build the solution with msbuild via the command line, or use CMake's build wrapper to do that for you:

cmake --build "<path to build dir>" --config Release

Using Ninja to build

The Ninja build system is shipped with Visual Studio since version 2019 and used by default if loading a CMake project directly from within the IDE. Ninja can also be installed separately.

To configure the build directory for Ninja, pass Ninja or Ninja Multi-Config as the argument for the -G switch. The difference between both generators is that the former uses CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to specify the configuration ( e.g. Debug or Release) while the latter supports all configurations in a single build directory, specified during build time.

The architecture is determined from the toolset, so make sure to run the commands in the correct Visual Studio command prompt, e.g. "Native Tools for X64".

Configure and build for a single-configuration Release build with vcpkg:

cmake -G "Ninja" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="<path to vcpkg>/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake" -S "<path to source dir>" -B "<path to build dir>"
cmake --build "<path to build dir>"

Same, but using the multi-configuration generator:

cmake -G "Ninja Multi-Config" -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="<path to vcpkg>/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake" -S "<path to source dir>" -B "<path to build dir>"
cmake --build "<path to build dir>" --config Release

Notes on other platforms and features

Raspberry Pi (and other embedded systems)

• projectM is arch-independent, although there are some SSE2 enhancements for x86
• Notes on running on raspberry pi

Build using NDK for Android

To build projectM using the Android SDK, please refer to the official NDK docs:

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/cmake

It is highly recommended using the latest NDK and CMake >= 3.21 for building.

LLVM JIT

There are some optimizations for parsing preset equations that leverage the LLVM JIT. You can try adding the CMake option -DENABLE_LLVM=ON to enable them. They may not work with a newer version of LLVM (https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm/pull/360).

Presets and textures

The libprojectM repository does no longer contain any additional assets like presets and textures. These have been outsourced into separate repositories to make it easier to select certain preset packs to be packaged in applications and to reduce the size and scope of the libprojectM repository.

Detailed CMake reference

If you require more in-depth information about the CMake build scripts, you will find more information below.

Selecting a specific project file generator

To specify a CMake generator, use the -G switch, followed by the generator name. Some newer generators take an additional architecture using the -A switch. To list all available generators available on your current platform, leave out the generator name:

cmake -G

Additional information on the supported generators can be found in the CMake documentation.

Popular generators

By default, CMake will use the Unix Makefiles generator on Linux and macOS, which is a good choice and should work. Yet in some circumstances, you might want to generate project files for a specific build tool or IDE:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -S /path/to/source/dir -B /path/to/build/dir

A common alternative is the Ninja generator, which requires ninja to be installed. It is mostly a make replacement with less overhead and should work equally well. It is supported on all major platforms, including Windows:

cmake -G Ninja -S /path/to/source/dir -B /path/to/build/dir

On macOS, CMake also supports the Xcode generator. It will create an .xcodeproj bundle which you can open in Xcode. It also adds support for automatic code signing, which might be required if your application using projectM needs to be notarized for store deployment.

cmake -G Xcode -S /path/to/source/dir -B /path/to/build/dir

If you develop on Windows, you will possibly use Visual Studio. While recent visual Studio versions have CMake support built-in, you can still pre-generate the solution and project files and open the .sln file from the build directory. CMake provides a separate generator for each Visual Studio release. For Visual Studio 2019 you would use the Visual Studio 16 2019 generator and provide an additional architecture parameter:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A "X64" -S /path/to/source/dir -B /path/to/build/dir

It is not possible to generate multi-arch solutions with CMake though. You need to create separate build directories and use the respective -A switch for each.

Project-specific configuration options

CMake has no built-in way of printing all available configuration options. You can either refer to the top-level CMakeLists.txt which contains a block of option and cmake_dependent_option commands, or use one of the available CMake UIs which will display the options after configuring the project once.

Boolean switches

The following table also gives you an overview of the available options and their defaults. All options accept a boolean value (YES/NO, TRUE/FALSE, ON/OFF or 1/0) and can be provided on the configuration-phase command line using the -D switch.

CMake option	Default	Required dependencies	Description
ENABLE_DEBUG_PREFIX	ON		Adds d to the name of any binary file in debug builds.
ENABLE_EMSCRIPTEN	OFF	GLES, Emscripten	Build for the web using Emscripten. Automatically enabled when using the Emscripten build tools.
ENABLE_SDL_UI	OFF	SDL2	Builds and installs the SDL test UI. Also required for the tests.
ENABLE_GLES	OFF	GLES	Use OpenGL ES 3 profile for rendering instead of the Core profile.
ENABLE_THREADING	ON	pthreads	Enable multithreading support. If enabled, will cause an error if pthreads are not available.
ENABLE_NATIVE_PRESETS	OFF		Builds and installs the binary (native) preset libraries.
ENABLE_TESTING	OFF	SDL2	Builds the unit tests.
ENABLE_LLVM	OFF	LLVM	Enables experimental LLVM JIT support.

Path options

There are also a few textual parameters that can be used to fine-tune the installation directories. Relative paths in the following options are appended to the value of CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX (which, on most UNIX platforms, defaults to /usr/local):

CMake option	Default	Description
PROJECTM_BIN_DIR	bin	Directory where executables (e.g. the unit tests) are installed.
PROJECTM_LIB_DIR	lib	Directory where libprojectM is installed.
PROJECTM_INCLUDE_DIR	include	Directory where the libprojectM include files will be installed under.

Always perform out-of-tree builds!

Most classic IDEs and build systems directly make use of the source tree and create project files, temporary build artifacts (e.g. object files) and the final binaries in the same directory structure as the source files. An advantage of this approach is that you can find all compiled binaries side-by-side with their sources and generated headers are already in the same directories as the source files including them. This approach has some drawbacks though:

• Only a single build configuration is supported as files are overwritten in-place.
• A lot of noise is created in the source directory, making it hard to distinguish between generated and original source files.
• A very large .gitignore file is required to cover all unwanted files.
• Mistakes in the build scripts can overwrite source files, causing errors and destroy uncommitted work.

Some of these can be mitigated by providing additional targets (make clean and make distclean) or creating subdirectories for Debug/Release build configurations.

While CMake also supports in-tree builds, it is "discouraged" in the official documentation, for the above reasons. Building out-of-tree allows it to create multiple build directories with different configurations which do not influence each other in any way. If a build directory contains unwanted artifacts, and you want to start fresh, simply delete and recreate the whole directory - no work is lost.

This project follow this principle by treating the original source tree as read-only and avoiding potential conflicts:

• Everything under CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR must only be read, never changed or written to.
• Everything under CMAKE_BINARY_DIR is temporary and related to the current build configuration.
• When generating configuration-dependent files, use CMAKE_CONFIGURATION_TYPES and CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to create non-conflicting files in the build tree.

While this project will not force you to build out-of-tree, there is no mechanism to clean up the generated files after running cmake in-tree.

CMake build directory layout

If you are new to CMake, the way of how CMake creates the build directory and where it creates the build targets might be confusing. Here is a summary of what's in the build directory and how it is structured in general.

Using files from the build tree

It is generally not good practice to directly take binaries and other files from the build tree for packaging, for several reasons:

1. The directory structure is generated by CMake and depends on the generator used. The layout might change between CMake versions, even for the same generator.
2. On platforms with RPATH support, CMake will store absolute paths in executables and shared libraries which point to the absolute paths of any linked dependencies, either from the build tree or external libraries as well. These binaries are not relocatable and will most certainly not work if run on any other computer (or even on the same after deleting the build directory).
3. For some configurations, even Release build artifacts may contain debug symbols until they are installed.

It is fine to build and run executables from the build directory for development and debugging. For packaging, always use the install target and copy files from there.

Generated files

In the top-level build directory, CMake creates a few files that are present on any platform:

• CMakeCache.txt: This file contains all variables and build settings CMake needs to remember from the first configuration run. This file can be edited on demand either manually or using a CMake UI to change any values. On the next build, CMake will regenerate the project files if this file has been modified.
• cmake_install.cmake: Contains generated install-related settings.
• install_manifest.txt: After installing the project, this file contains a list with absolute filenames of all installed files. It can be used for packaging or deleting installed files as CMake doesn't define an uninstall target.
• The top-level project file for use with the selected build toolset, e.g. Makefile, build.ninja, projectm.sln or projectm.xcodeproj, plus additional toolset-specific files.

The projectM build files generate additional files used in the build and install phases:

• config.inp: The default configuration file, by default installed to <prefix>/share/projectM.
• libprojectM.pc: Package configuration file for use with pkgconfig.
• include/config.h: A forced include file that contains macro definitions to enable or disable certain code features based on the build configuration and availability of platform headers and features. Similar to the autoheader-generated file.

Subdirectory structure

The rest of the directory structure generally resembles the source tree. Source directories containing a CMakeLists.txt file will also be created in the build tree with the same relative path. Each of these subdirectories contains a CMakeFiles directory with CMake-internal data, generated project files for the select toolset, e.g. makefiles and any temporary compile artifacts.

Executable and library locations

Build targets - shared/static libraries and executables - are created in the same subdirectory in the build tree as the CMakeLists.txt file that defines the target in the source tree (which, in most cases, resides in the same directory as the source files). Depending on the generator used, the binaries are created directly in the directory for single-configuration generators (like Unix Makefiles or Ninja) and in a subdirectory with the configuration name, e.g. Debug or Release, for multi-configuration generators like Xcode or Visual Studio 16 2019.

You may also find additional files and symbolic links in the same location depending on the platform, e.g. .pdb files on Windows.

Using libprojectM in other CMake projects

See also: Integration quickstart guide

The built and installed static or shared projectM library can be used in other CMake-based projects to provide embedded audio visualization using find_package(libprojectM). There are also two additional ways:

• Importing the library CMake targets directly from the build tree without installation.
• Directly adding/compiling the libprojectM source tree into the embedding application.

The latter approach is not recommended for different technical reasons and should generally be avoided.

Importing libprojectM targets from the build tree

This approach is useful for projects that either require more in-depth access to the projectM library files, especially to headers that are not installed as part of the public API. This might cause issues if the internal headers change, but gives a broader set of features and more control to the developer.

To use the targets, follow these steps:

• Configure the build directory as needed.
• Build the required library targets projectM_static and projectM_shared as needed, or simply everything.
• Include the file src/libprojectM/projectM-exports.cmake from the projectM build tree in your project.

All targets and their interface properties are now defined and can be used.

Example

# libprojectM.a/.lib is already built.
set(PROJECTM_BUILD_DIR "/some/path/to/projectM/build")
include("${PROJECTM_BUILD_DIR}/src/libprojectM/projectM-exports.cmake")

add_executable(MyApp main.cpp)

target_link_libraries(MyApp PRIVATE libprojectM::static)

This will also add all projectM include directories to the target's source files, pointing to the respective projectM source directories.

Look at the generated file in the build tree if you need more details about the available targets.

Importing libprojectM targets from an installed version

This is the recommended way of importing libprojectM in your project. This project installs a set of CMake files in <PREFIX>/<LIBDIR>/cmake/libprojectM, containing target definitions, version and dependency checks as well as any additional libraries required for linking. Other projects then use CMake's find_package command to search for these files in different locations.

In the case projectM libraries and headers are not installed in any system search path, you need to add either the install prefix path (the top-level install dir) or the directory containing the libraries (the lib dir by default) to the CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH list.

If the package was found, you can then link against one of these provided targets:

• libprojectM::static - The static library (.a or .lib).
• libprojectM::shared - The shared library (.so, .dylib or .dll).

Note that the availability of the targets depend on the platform and build configuration, so only one of those might be available. You can check with if(TARGET libprojectM::static) and if(TARGET libprojectM::shared) to select the available or preferred one.

Depending on how the package was built, targets might be available for multiple configurations or only Release. CMake will automatically select the most appropriate one to link.

Include dirs, additional link dependencies and possible compiler options will be propagated to any target the library is linked to.

Example

Links the shared library preferably, with fallback to static:

find_package(libprojectM REQUIRED)

if (TARGET libprojectM::shared)
    set(PROJECTM_LINK_TARGET libprojectM::shared)
else ()
    # If this target is also unavailable, CMake will error out on target_link_libraries().
    set(PROJECTM_LINK_TARGET libprojectM::static)
endif ()

add_executable(MyApp main.cpp)

target_link_libraries(MyApp PRIVATE ${PROJECTM_LINK_TARGET})