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Kiwix is an offline reader for web content. It's especially thought to make Wikipedia available offline. This is done by reading the content of the project stored in a file format ZIM, a high compressed open format with additional meta-data.

This repository contains advanced tools to (cross-)compile easily Kiwix softwares and library and deploy them. They have been tested on Fedora 23 and Ubuntu 16.10.

You will need a recent version of meson (0.34) and ninja (1.6) If your distribution provides a recent enough versions for them, just install them with your package manager. Continue to read the instructions otherwise.

Before anything else you need to install Python3 related tools. On Debian based systems:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip virtualenv

Then install Meson:

virtualenv -p python3 ./ # Create virtualenv
source bin/activate      # Activate the virtualenv
pip3 install meson       # Install Meson
hash -r                  # Refresh bash paths

Finally we need the Ninja tool (available in the $PATH). Here is a solution to download, build and install it locally:

git clone git://github.com/ninja-build/ninja.git
cd ninja
git checkout release
./configure.py --bootstrap
mkdir ../bin
cp ninja ../bin
cd ..

The compilation is handled by kiwix-build.py. It will compile everything. If you are using a supported platform (Redhat or Debian based) it will install missing packages using sudo. You can get kiwix-build.py usage like this:

./kiwix-build.py -h

By default, kiwix-build.py will build kiwix-tools. If you want to compile another target only (let's said kiwixlib), you can specify it:

./kiwix-build Kiwixlib

By default, kiwix-build.py will build everything for the current (native) platform using dynamic linkage (hence the native_dyn of the BUILD_native_dyn directory).

But you can select another target platform using the option target-platform. For now, there is ten different supported platforms :

• native_dyn
• native_static
• win32_dyn
• win32_static
• android_arm
• android_arm64
• android_mips
• android_mips64
• android_x86
• android_x86_64

So, if you want to compile for win32 using static linkage:

./kiwix-build.py --target-platform win32_dyn

Kiwix-build.py will create several directories:

• ARCHIVES: All the downloaded archives go there.
• SOURCES: All the sources (extracted from archives and patched) go there.
• BUILD_native_dyn: All the build files go there.
• BUILD_native_dyn/INSTALL: The installed files go there.
• BUILD_native_dyn/LOGS: The logs files of the build.

If you want to install all those directories elsewhere, you can pass the --working-dir option to kiwix-build.py: