<title>Building and Installing Fossil</title>
<p>This page describes how to build and install Fossil. The
whole process is designed to be very easy.</p>
<h2>0.0 Using A Pre-compiled Binary</h2>
<p>You can skip steps 1.0 and 2.0 below by downloading
a <a href="http://www.fossil-scm.org/download.html">pre-compiled binary</a>
appropriate for your platform. If you use a pre-compiled binary
jump immediate to step 3.0.</p>
<h2>1.0 Obtaining The Source Code</h2>
<p>Fossil is self-hosting, so you can obtain a ZIP archive containing
a snapshot of the latest version directly from fossil's own fossil
repository. Follow these steps:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Pointer your web browser at
<a href="http://www.fossil-scm.org/">
http://www.fossil-scm.org/</a>. Click on the "Login" menu button.</p></li>
<li><p>Log in as anonymous. The password is shown on screen.
The reason for requiring this login is to prevent spiders from
walking the entire website, downloading ZIP archives
of every historical version, and thereby soaking up all our bandwidth.</p></li>
<li><p>Click on the
<a href="http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/timeline">Timeline</a> or
<a href="http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/leaves">Leaves</a> link at
the top of the page.</p></li>
<li><p>Select a version of of fossil you want to download. Click on its
link. Note that you must successfully log in as "anonymous" in step 1
above in order to see the link to the detailed version information.</p></li>
<li><p>Finally, click on the
"Zip Archive" link. This link will build a ZIP archive of the
complete source code and download it to your browser.
</ol>
<h2>2.0 Compiling</h2>
<p>Follow these steps to compile on a unix platform
(Linux, *BSD, MacOS, etc):</p>
<ol>
<li value="6">
<p>Create a directory to hold the source code. Then unzip the
ZIP archive you downloaded into that directory. You should be
in the top-level folder of that directory</p></li>
<li><p><b>(Optional:)</b>
Edit the Makefile to set it up like you want. You probably do not
need to do anything. Do not be intimidated: There are less than 10
variables in the makefile that can be changed. The whole Makefile
is only a few dozen lines long and most of those lines are comments.</p>
<li><p>Type "<b>make</b>"
</ol>
<p>To build on windows, use an alternative makefile suitable for your
particular build environment. The alternative windows makefiles are
all found in the win/ subdirectory of the source tree. So, for example,
if you want build using the
[http://www.mingw.org/ | mingw/msys compiler package] for windows, then
run "<b>make -f win/Makefile.mingw</b>" instead of just "<b>make</b>"
in step 8 above.</p>
<h2>3.0 Installing</h2>
<ol>
<li value="9">
<p>The finished binary is named "fossil" (or "fossil.exe" on windows).
Put this binary in a
directory that is somewhere on your PATH environment variable.
It does not matter where.</p>
<li>
<p><b>(Optional:)</b>
To uninstall, just delete the binary.</p>
</ol>
<h2>4.0 Additional Considerations</h2>
</nowiki>
* If the makefiles that come with Fossil do not work for
you, or for some other reason you want to know how to build
Fossil manually, then refer to the
[./makefile.wiki | Fossil Build Process] document which describes
in detail what the makefiles do behind the scenes.