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++ 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 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

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. As Anki requires Python 3.9, this means you will need a fairly up-to-date distro such as Debian 11.

After installing the system libraries (eg 'sudo apt install python3-pyqt5.qtwebengine'), find the place they are installed (eg '/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages'). Then before running any commands like './run', tell Anki where they can be found:

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

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 and node are downloaded as part of the build. You can optionally define PYTHON_BINARY as the full path to a Python binary, to use it instead of the downloaded version. A similar approach could be done with node in the future; a PR would be welcome.

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

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

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