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class="menu item"><a href="lxml-source-howto.html#where-to-start">Where to start?</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="lxml-source-howto.html#lxml-etree">lxml.etree</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="lxml-source-howto.html#python-modules">Python modules</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="lxml-source-howto.html#lxml-objectify">lxml.objectify</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="lxml-source-howto.html#lxml-html">lxml.html</a></li></ul></li></ul><ul class="menu foreign" id="changes 4 2 5-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="changes-4.2.5.html">Release Changelog</a></li></ul><ul class="menu foreign" id="credits-menu"><li class="menu title"><a href="credits.html">Credits</a><ul class="submenu"><li class="menu item"><a href="credits.html#main-contributors">Main contributors</a></li><li class="menu item"><a href="credits.html#special-thanks-goes-to">Special thanks goes to:</a></li></ul></li></ul></li><li><a href="/sitemap.html">Sitemap</a></li></ul></div></div><h1 class="title">How to build lxml from source</h1>
<p>To build lxml from source, you need libxml2 and libxslt properly
installed, <em>including the header files</em>. These are likely shipped in
separate <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">-dev</span></tt> or <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">-devel</span></tt> packages like <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">libxml2-dev</span></tt>, which
you must install before trying to build lxml.</p>
<div class="contents topic" id="contents">
<p class="topic-title first">Contents</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#cython" id="id2">Cython</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#github-git-and-hg" id="id3">Github, git and hg</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#building-the-sources" id="id4">Building the sources</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#running-the-tests-and-reporting-errors" id="id5">Running the tests and reporting errors</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#building-an-egg-or-wheel" id="id6">Building an egg or wheel</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#building-lxml-on-macos-x" id="id7">Building lxml on MacOS-X</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#static-linking-on-windows" id="id8">Static linking on Windows</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#building-debian-packages-from-svn-sources" id="id9">Building Debian packages from SVN sources</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="section" id="cython">
<h1>Cython</h1>
<p>The lxml.etree and lxml.objectify modules are written in <a class="reference external" href="http://cython.org">Cython</a>.
Since we distribute the Cython-generated .c files with lxml releases,
however, you do not need Cython to build lxml from the normal release
sources. We even encourage you to <em>not install Cython</em> for a normal
release build, as the generated C code can vary quite heavily between
Cython versions, which may or may not generate correct code for lxml.
The pre-generated release sources were tested and therefore are known
to work.</p>
<p>So, if you want a reliable build of lxml, we suggest to a) use a
source release of lxml and b) disable or uninstall Cython for the
build.</p>
<p><em>Only</em> if you are interested in building lxml from a checkout of the
developer sources (e.g. to test a bug fix that has not been release
yet) or if you want to be an lxml developer, then you do need a
working Cython installation. You can use <a class="reference external" href="http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip">pip</a> to install it:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
pip install -r requirements.txt
</pre>
<p><a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/lxml/lxml/blob/master/requirements.txt">https://github.com/lxml/lxml/blob/master/requirements.txt</a></p>
<p>lxml currently requires at least Cython 0.20, later release versions
should work as well.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="github-git-and-hg">
<h1>Github, git and hg</h1>
<p>The lxml package is developed in a repository on <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/lxml/">Github</a> using
<a class="reference external" href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> and the <a class="reference external" href="http://hg-git.github.com/">hg-git</a> plugin. You can retrieve the current
developer version using:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
hg clone git+ssh://git@github.com/lxml/lxml.git lxml
</pre>
<p>Or, using git:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
git clone ssh://git@github.com/lxml/lxml.git lxml
</pre>
<p>This will create a directory <tt class="docutils literal">lxml</tt> and download the source into it,
including the complete development history. Don't be afraid, the
repository download is fairly quick. You can also browse the
<a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/lxml/lxml">lxml repository</a> through the web or download a ZIP archive with the
<a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/lxml/lxml/archive/master.zip">latest master branch</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="building-the-sources">
<h1>Building the sources</h1>
<p>Clone the source repository as described above (or download
the <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/lxml/lxml/tarball/master">source tar-ball</a> and unpack it) and then type:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py build
</pre>
<p>or:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py bdist_egg # requires 'setuptools' or 'distribute'
</pre>
<p>To (re-)build the C sources with Cython, you must additionally pass the
option <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">--with-cython</span></tt>:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py build --with-cython
</pre>
<p>If you want to test lxml from the source directory, it is better to build it
in-place like this:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py build_ext -i --with-cython
</pre>
<p>or, in Unix-like environments:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
make inplace
</pre>
<p>To speed up the build in test environments (e.g. on a continuous
integration server), set the <tt class="docutils literal">CFLAGS</tt> environment variable to
disable C compiler optimisations (e.g. "-O0" for gcc, that's
minus-oh-zero), for example:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
CFLAGS="-O0" make inplace
</pre>
<p>If you get errors about missing header files (e.g. <tt class="docutils literal">Python.h</tt> or
<tt class="docutils literal">libxml/xmlversion.h</tt>) then you need to make sure the development
packages of Python, libxml2 and libxslt are properly installed. On
Linux distributions, they are usually called something like
<tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">libxml2-dev</span></tt> or <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">libxslt-devel</span></tt>. If these packages were
installed in non-standard places, try passing the following option to
setup.py to make sure the right config is found:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py build --with-xslt-config=/path/to/xslt-config
</pre>
<p>There are also env vars to allow overriding the config tool:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
env XML2_CONFIG=/path/to/xml2-config python build
</pre>
<p>You may also use <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">pkg-config</span></tt> as the tools:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
env XSLT_CONFIG="pkg-config libxslt" python setup.py build
</pre>
<p>If this doesn't help, you may have to add the location of the header
files to the include path like:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py build_ext -i -I /usr/include/libxml2
</pre>
<p>where the file is in <tt class="docutils literal">/usr/include/libxml2/libxml/xmlversion.h</tt></p>
<p>To use lxml.etree in-place, you can place lxml's <tt class="docutils literal">src</tt> directory
on your Python module search path (PYTHONPATH) and then import
<tt class="docutils literal">lxml.etree</tt> to play with it:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
# cd lxml
# PYTHONPATH=src python
Python 2.7.2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from lxml import etree
>>>
</pre>
<p>To make sure everything gets recompiled cleanly after changes, you can
run <tt class="docutils literal">make clean</tt> or delete the file <tt class="docutils literal">src/lxml/etree.c</tt>.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="running-the-tests-and-reporting-errors">
<h1>Running the tests and reporting errors</h1>
<p>The source distribution (tgz) and the source repository contain a test
suite for lxml. You can run it from the top-level directory:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python test.py
</pre>
<p>Note that the test script only tests the in-place build (see distutils
building above), as it searches the <tt class="docutils literal">src</tt> directory. You can use the
following one-step command to trigger an in-place build and test it:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
make test
</pre>
<p>This also runs the ElementTree and cElementTree compatibility tests. To call
them separately, make sure you have lxml on your PYTHONPATH first, then run:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python selftest.py
</pre>
<p>and:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python selftest2.py
</pre>
<p>If the tests give failures, errors, or worse, segmentation faults, we'd really
like to know. Please contact us on the <a class="reference external" href="http://lxml.de/mailinglist/">mailing list</a>, and please specify
the version of lxml, libxml2, libxslt and Python you were using, as well as
your operating system type (Linux, Windows, MacOS-X, ...).</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="building-an-egg-or-wheel">
<h1>Building an egg or wheel</h1>
<p>This is the procedure to make an lxml egg or <a class="reference external" href="https://wheel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/">wheel</a> for your platform.
It assumes that you have <tt class="docutils literal">setuptools</tt> or <tt class="docutils literal">distribute</tt> installed, as well
as the <tt class="docutils literal">wheel</tt> package.</p>
<p>First, download the lxml-x.y.tar.gz release. This contains the pregenerated
C files so that you can be sure you build exactly from the release sources.
Unpack them and <tt class="docutils literal">cd</tt> into the resulting directory. Then, to build a wheel,
simply run the command</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py bdist_wheel
</pre>
<p>or, to build a statically linked wheel with all of libxml2, libxslt and
friends compiled in, run</p>
<blockquote>
python setup.py bdist_wheel --static-deps</blockquote>
<p>The resulting .whl file will be written into the <tt class="docutils literal">dist</tt> directory.</p>
<p>To build an egg file, run</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py build_egg
</pre>
<p>If you are on a Unix-like platform, you can first build the extension modules
using</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py build
</pre>
<p>and then <tt class="docutils literal">cd</tt> into the directory <tt class="docutils literal">build/lib.your.platform</tt> to call
<tt class="docutils literal">strip</tt> on any <tt class="docutils literal">.so</tt> file you find there. This reduces the size of
the binary distribution considerably. Then, from the package root directory,
call</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py bdist_egg
</pre>
<p>This will quickly package the pre-built packages into an egg file and
drop it into the <tt class="docutils literal">dist</tt> directory.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="building-lxml-on-macos-x">
<h1>Building lxml on MacOS-X</h1>
<p>Apple regularly ships new system releases with horribly outdated
system libraries. This is specifically the case for libxml2 and
libxslt, where the system provided versions used to be too old
to even build lxml for a long time.</p>
<p>While the Unix environment in MacOS-X makes it relatively easy to
install Unix/Linux style package management tools and new software, it
actually seems to be hard to get libraries set up for exclusive usage
that MacOS-X ships in an older version. Alternative distributions
(like macports) install their libraries in addition to the system
libraries, but the compiler and the runtime loader on MacOS still sees
the system libraries before the new libraries. This can lead to
undebuggable crashes where the newer library seems to be loaded but
the older system library is used.</p>
<p>Apple discourages static building against libraries, which would help
working around this problem. Apple does not ship static library
binaries with its system and several package management systems follow
this decision. Therefore, building static binaries requires building
the dependencies first. The <tt class="docutils literal">setup.py</tt> script does this
automatically when you call it like this:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py build --static-deps
</pre>
<p>This will download and build the latest versions of libxml2 and
libxslt from the official FTP download site. If you want to use
specific versions, or want to prevent any online access, you can
download both <tt class="docutils literal">tar.gz</tt> release files yourself, place them into a
subdirectory <tt class="docutils literal">libs</tt> in the lxml distribution, and call <tt class="docutils literal">setup.py</tt>
with the desired target versions like this:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py build --static-deps \
--libxml2-version=2.9.1 \
--libxslt-version=1.1.28 \
sudo python setup.py install
</pre>
<p>Instead of <tt class="docutils literal">build</tt>, you can use any target, like <tt class="docutils literal">bdist_egg</tt>
if you want to use setuptools to build an installable egg, or
<tt class="docutils literal">bdist_wheel</tt> for a wheel package.</p>
<p>Note that this also works with <a class="reference external" href="http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip">pip</a>. Since you can't pass
command line options in this case, you have to use an environment
variable instead:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
STATIC_DEPS=true pip install lxml
</pre>
<p>To install the package into the system Python package directory,
run the installation with "sudo":</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
STATIC_DEPS=true sudo pip install lxml
</pre>
<p>The <tt class="docutils literal">STATICBUILD</tt> environment variable is handled equivalently to
the <tt class="docutils literal">STATIC_DEPS</tt> variable, but is used by some other extension
packages, too.</p>
<p>If you decide to do a non-static build, you may also have to install
the command line tools in addition to the XCode build environment.
They are available as a restricted download from here:</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action">https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action</a>?=command%20line%20tools#</p>
<p>Without them, the compiler may not find the necessary header files of
the XML libraries, according to the second comment in this ticket:</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/lxml/+bug/1244094">https://bugs.launchpad.net/lxml/+bug/1244094</a></p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="static-linking-on-windows">
<h1>Static linking on Windows</h1>
<p>Most operating systems have proper package management that makes installing
current versions of libxml2 and libxslt easy. The most famous exception is
Microsoft Windows, which entirely lacks these capabilities. To work around
the limits of this platform, lxml's installation can download pre-built
packages of the dependencies and build statically against them. Assuming
you have a proper C compiler setup to build Python extensions, this should
work:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
python setup.py bdist_wininst --static-deps
</pre>
<p>It should create a windows installer in the <tt class="docutils literal">pkg</tt> directory.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="building-debian-packages-from-svn-sources">
<h1>Building Debian packages from SVN sources</h1>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.lxml.devel/1239/focus=1249">Andreas Pakulat</a> proposed the following approach.</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">apt-get</span> source lxml</tt></li>
<li>remove the unpacked directory</li>
<li>tar.gz the lxml SVN version and replace the orig.tar.gz that lies in the
directory</li>
<li>check md5sum of created tar.gz file and place new sum and size in dsc file</li>
<li>do <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">dpkg-source</span> <span class="pre">-x</span> <span class="pre">lxml-[VERSION].dsc</span></tt> and cd into the newly created directory</li>
<li>run <tt class="docutils literal">dch <span class="pre">-i</span></tt> and add a comment like "use trunk version", this will
increase the debian version number so apt/dpkg won't get confused</li>
<li>run <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">dpkg-buildpackage</span> <span class="pre">-rfakeroot</span> <span class="pre">-us</span> <span class="pre">-uc</span></tt> to build the package</li>
</ul>
<p>In case <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">dpkg-buildpackage</span></tt> tells you that some dependencies are missing, you
can either install them manually or run <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">apt-get</span> <span class="pre">build-dep</span> lxml</tt>.</p>
<p>That will give you .deb packages in the parent directory which can be
installed using <tt class="docutils literal">dpkg <span class="pre">-i</span></tt>.</p>
</div>
</div>
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