Compiling from source on UNIX

If you downloaded the source distribution, you need at least the following to build the executable:

The GNU tools flex, bison, libiconv and GNU make
You need python (version 2.7 or higher, see https://www.python.org).
In order to generate a Makefile for your platform, you need cmake version 3.3 or later.

To take full advantage of doxygen's features the following additional tools should be installed.

Qt Software's GUI toolkit Qt version 5.14 or higher (including Qt 6). This is needed to build the GUI front-end doxywizard.
A ${\LaTeX}$ distribution: for instance TeX Live This is needed for generating ${\LaTeX}$ , Postscript, and PDF output.
the Graph visualization toolkit version 2.38 or higher Needed for the include dependency graphs, the graphical inheritance graphs, and the collaboration graphs. If you compile graphviz yourself, make sure you do include freetype support (which requires the freetype library and header files), otherwise the graphs will not render proper text labels.
For formulas in the HTML output (when MathJax is not used) or in case you do not wish to use pdflatex, the ghostscript interpreter is needed. You can find it at www.ghostscript.com.

Compilation is now done by performing the following steps:

Unpack the archive, unless you already have done that:

gunzip doxygen-$VERSION.src.tar.gz    # uncompress the archive
tar xf doxygen-$VERSION.src.tar       # unpack it

Create a build directory (for instance inside the source tree)
```
cd doxygen-$VERSION
mkdir build
cd build
```
Run cmake with the makefile generator
```
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" ..
```
cmake tries to determine the platform you use, and will look for the requires tools. It will report if something is missing.

If you have Qt-5.14 or higher installed and want to build the GUI front-end, you should enable it as follows:
```
cmake -Dbuild_wizard=YES ..
```
For an overview of other configuration options use
```
cmake -L ..
```
Compile the program by running make:
```
make
```
The program should compile without problems and the binaries (doxygen and optionally doxywizard) should be available in the bin directory within the build directory.
Optional: Generate the user manual.
```
cmake -Dbuild_doc=YES ..
make docs
```
To let doxygen generate the HTML and PDF documentation.

The HTML directory within the build directory will now contain the html documentation (just point a HTML browser to the file index.html in the html directory).

Optional: static linking

If you want to build a statically linked version of doxygen that embeds libclang you need to first build LLVM and clang from sources using the following options:

cmake -DLIBCLANG_BUILD_STATIC=ON \
      -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF \
      -DLLVM_ENABLE_PIC=OFF \
      -DLLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB=OFF \
      -DLLVM_BUILD_LLVM_C_DYLIB=OFF \
      -DLLVM_ENABLE_TERMINFO=OFF \
      path_to_llvm_root_source_dir

and then build doxygen with these options:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
      "-DCMAKE_FIND_LIBRARY_SUFFIXES=.a" \
      "-ldl;-lz;-lpthread" \
      -Duse_libclang=YES \
      path_to_doxygen_root_source_dir

Installing the binaries on UNIX

After the compilation of the source code do a make install to install doxygen. If you downloaded the binary distribution for Linux, type:

make install

Binaries are installed into the directory /usr/local/bin, man pages in /usr/local/man/man1 and documentation in /usr/local/doc/doxygen To change this just edit the Makefile.

Note: You need the GNU install tool for this to work (it is part of the coreutils package). Other install tools may put the binaries in the wrong directory!

If you have a RPM or DEB package, then please follow the standard installation procedure that is required for these packages.

Compiling from source on Windows

From version 1.8.10 onwards, build files need to be generated by cmake. cmake can be downloaded from https://cmake.org/download/

At the moment only the community version of Visual Studio 2019 is tested, but other version might also work.

Alternatively, you can compile doxygen the UNIX way using Cygwin or MinGW.

The next step is to install modern versions of bison and flex (see https://sourceforge.net/projects/winflexbison/. After installation and adding them to your path rename win_flex.exe to flex.exe and win_bison.exe to bison.exe) Furthermore you have to install python (version 2.7 or higher, see https://www.python.org). These packages are needed during the compilation process.

Download doxygen's source tarball and put it somewhere (e.g. use c:\tools)

Now start a visual studio native command shell (for either x86 or x64) and type

cd c:\tools
tar zxvf doxygen-x.y.z.src.tar.gz

to unpack the sources (you can obtain tar from e.g. http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html). Alternatively you can use an unpack program, like 7-Zip (see https://www.7-zip.org/) or use the built-in unpack feature of modern Windows systems).

Now your environment is setup to generate the required project files for doxygen.

cd into the doxygen-x.y.z directory, create and cd to a build directory

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 2015" ..

This will create a project file then can be opened in Visual Studio.

If you prefer compiling from the command prompt you can use the following instead:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" ..
nmake

Note that compiling Doxywizard requires Qt 5.14 or newer (see https://www.qt.io/developers).

Also read the next section for additional tools you may need to install to run doxygen with certain features enabled.

Installing the binaries on Windows

Doxygen comes as a self-installing archive, so installation is extremely simple. Just follow the dialogs.

After installation it is recommended to also download and install GraphViz (version 2.38 or better is highly recommended). Doxygen can use the dot tool of the GraphViz package to render nicer diagrams, see the HAVE_DOT option in the configuration file.

If you want to produce compressed HTML files (see GENERATE_HTMLHELP) in the configuration file, then you need the Microsoft HTML help workshop. In the beginning of 2021 Microsoft took the original page, with a.o. the download links, offline the HTML help workshop was already many years in maintenance mode). You can download the HTML help workshop from the web archives at Installation executable.

If you want to produce Qt Compressed Help files (see QHG_LOCATION) in the configuration file, then you need qhelpgenerator which is part of Qt. You can download Qt from Qt Software Downloads.

In order to generate PDF output or use scientific formulas you will also need to install LaTeX and Ghostscript.

For ${\LaTeX}$ a number of distributions exists. Popular ones that should work with doxygen are MikTex and proTeXt.

Ghostscript can be downloaded from Sourceforge.

After installing ${\LaTeX}$ and Ghostscript you'll need to make sure the tools latex.exe, pdflatex.exe, and gswin32c.exe (or gswin64c.exe) are present in the search path of a command box. Follow these instructions if you are unsure and run the commands from a command box to verify it works.

Go to the next section or return to the index.

Table of Contents

Compiling from source on UNIX

Installing the binaries on UNIX

Compiling from source on Windows

Installing the binaries on Windows