Building Ardour on Linux

Stop!

Do you really need to do this? We provide ready-to-run packages of Ardour. Unless you are a developer with experience compiling and building applications from source, this document is not for you. Please go back to the download page

Before You Start

1. make sure you have gcc/g++ installed. gcc --version will check this. You should ideally have version 5 or above.
2. You will need git installed
3. You will need Python version 2.6 or later installed
4. If you want JACK support, you must have a suitably new version of JACK installed. For JackOSX, version 0.89 or newer. For JACK1, 0.121 or newer.

Getting Required Libraries and Tools

Ardour uses a lot of software libraries to provide functionality needed by the program. Before you can build Ardour, you will need to make sure that your system has all of the current dependencies installed. You can do this using your system's software update/install tool, or if you are comfortable compiling source code, from the source code of each dependency. Ardour developers in general do not provide assistance with this task, so please don't ask us for help.

If you use your system software update/install tool, you must have the "development" versions of all packages. The "normal" versions are there to be able to run software that uses the package, but they do not work when trying to build other software.

Building Ardour

From here on, we will refer to the directory where your Ardour source code is located as $AD. It does not matter where it is located on your system. Typically it will be a location such as ~/ardour or maybe /usr/local/src/ardour

If building from git, checkout Ardour

cd $AD
git clone git://git.ardour.org/ardour/ardour.git
cd $AD/ardour
      

OR If building from a source tarball, unpack it

cd $AD
tar xf /where/you/put/the/src/tarball
cd ardour-<VERSION>
      

Now, the build

./waf configure
./waf
      

You do not need to install in order to use your new build of Ardour. You can run it from within the build tree:

cd gtk2_ardour
./ardev
	  

To install the results:

./waf install
	  

To uninstall:

./waf uninstall
	  

To clean up results of a build (objects, libraries, etc) use

./waf clean
	  

Note however that uninstall only works correctly for the currently configured source tree. This is why installing Ardour directly (without packaging) is highly discouraged.

Creating an Application Bundle

Ardour is distributed by ardour.org in the form of "bundles", which are nothing more than a directory tree which contain everything the app needs to run.

cd tools/linux_packaging
./build --public --strip some
./package --public --singlearch
      

You now have a functioning binary bundle, in the form a .tar file.

Building with Windows VST Support

Please read this document about using Windows VST on Linux. We don't wish to encourage this practice, even though it is possible to do so.