Linux-specific notes

Requirements

These instructions are written for Debian/Ubuntu; adjust for your distribution. Some extra notes have been provided by a forum member, though some of the things mentioned there no longer apply: https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/guide-how-to-build-and-run-anki-from-source-with-xubuntu-20-04/12865

You can see a full list of buildtime and runtime requirements by looking at the Dockerfiles used to build the official releases.

Glibc is required - if you are on a distro like Alpine that uses musl, things may not work.

Users on ARM64, see the notes at the bottom of this file before proceeding.

Ensure some basic tools are installed:

$ sudo apt install bash grep findutils curl gcc g++ make git rsync ninja-build

The 'find' utility is 'findutils' on Debian.
Your distro may call the package 'ninja' instead of 'ninja-build', or it may not have a version new enough - if so, install from the zip mentioned in development.md.

Missing Libraries

If you get errors during build or startup, try starting with

QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1 ./run

It will likely complain about missing libraries, which you can install with your package manager. Some of the libraries that might be required on Debian for example:

sudo apt install libxcb-icccm4 libxcb-image0 libxcb-keysyms1 \
  libxcb-randr0 libxcb-render-util0

On some distros such as Arch Linux and Fedora, you may need to install the libxcrypt-compat package if you get an error like this:

error while loading shared libraries: libcrypt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Audio

To play and record audio during development, install mpv and lame.

ARM64 support

Other platforms download PyQt binary wheels from PyPI. There are no PyQt wheels available for ARM Linux, so you will need to rely on your system-provided libraries instead. Your distro will need to have Python 3.9 or later.

After installing the system libraries (eg 'sudo apt install python3-pyqt6.qt{quick,webengine} python3-venv'), find the place they are installed (eg '/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages'). On modern Ubuntu, you'll need 'sudo apt remove python3-protobuf'. Then before running any commands like './run', tell Anki where the packages can be found:

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages
export PYTHON_BINARY=/usr/bin/python3

There are a few things to be aware of:

You should use ./run and not tools/run-qt5*, even if your system libraries are Qt5.
If your system libraries are Qt5, when creating an aqt wheel, the wheel will not work on Qt6 environments.
Some of the './ninja check' tests are broken on ARM Linux.

Packaging considerations

Python, node and protoc are downloaded as part of the build. You can optionally define PYTHON_BINARY, NODE_BINARY, YARN_BINARY and/or PROTOC_BINARY to use locally-installed versions instead.

If rust-toolchain.toml is removed, newer Rust versions can be used. Older versions may or may not compile the code.

To build Anki fully offline, set the following environment variables:

OFFLINE_BUILD: If set, the build does not run tools that may access the network.
NODE_BINARY, YARN_BINARY and PROTOC_BINARY must also be set.

With OFFLINE_BUILD defined, manual intervention is required for the offline build to succeed. The following conditions must be met:

All required dependencies (node, Python, rust, yarn, etc.) must be present in the build environment.
The offline repositories for the translation files must be copied/linked to ftl/qt-repo and ftl/core-repo.
The Python pseudo venv must be set up:
```
mkdir out/pyenv/bin
ln -s /path/to/python out/pyenv/bin/python
ln -s /path/to/protoc-gen-mypy out/pyenv/bin/protoc-gen-mypy
```
Optionally, set up your environment to generate Sphinx documentation:
```
ln -s /path/to/sphinx-apidoc out/pyenv/bin/sphinx-apidoc
ln -s /path/to/sphinx-build out/pyenv/bin/sphinx-build
```
Note that the PYTHON_BINARY environment variable need not be set, since it is only used when OFFLINE_BUILD is unset to automatically create a network-dependent Python venv.
Create the offline cache for yarn and use its own environment variable YARN_CACHE_FOLDER to it:
```
YARN_CACHE_FOLDER=/path/to/the/yarn/cache
/path/to/yarn install --ignore-scripts
```

You are now ready to build wheels and Sphinx documentation fully offline.

For info on running tests, building wheels and so on, please see Development.

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