Doxygen
Installation

First go to the download page to get the latest distribution, if you did not downloaded doxygen already.

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 and GNU make, and strip
  • In order to generate a Makefile for your platform, you need perl
  • The configure script assume the availability of standard UNIX tools such as sed, date, find, uname, mv, cp, cat, echo, tr, cd, and rm.

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

  • Qt Software's GUI toolkit Qt version 4.3 or higher. This is needed to build the GUI front-end doxywizard.
  • A $\mbox{\LaTeX}$ distribution: for instance teTeX 1.0 This is needed for generating LaTeX, Postscript, and PDF output.
  • the Graph visualization toolkit version 1.8.10 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 or if you do not wish to use pdflatex, the ghostscript interpreter is needed. You can find it at www.ghostscript.com.
  • In order to generate doxygen's own documentation, Python is needed, you can find it at www.python.org.

Compilation is now done by performing the following steps:

  1. 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
    

  2. Run the configure script:

    sh ./configure
    

    The script tries to determine the platform you use, the make tool (which must be GNU make) and the perl interpreter. It will report what it finds.

    To override the auto detected platform and compiler you can run configure as follows:

    configure --platform platform-type
    

    See the PLATFORMS file for a list of possible platform options.

    If you have Qt-4.3 or higher installed and want to build the GUI front-end, you should run the configure script with the –with-doxywizard option:

    configure --with-doxywizard
    

    For an overview of other configuration options use

    configure --help
    

  3. 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 of the distribution.

  4. Optional: Generate the user manual.

    make docs
    

    To let doxygen generate the HTML documentation.

    The HTML directory of the distribution will now contain the html documentation (just point a HTML browser to the file index.html in the html directory). You will need the python interpreter for this.

  5. Optional: Generate a PDF version of the manual (you will need pdflatex, makeindex, and egrep for this).

    make pdf

    The PDF manual doxygen_manual.pdf will be located in the latex directory of the distribution. Just view and print it via the acrobat reader.

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 UNIX, type:

./configure
make install

Binaries are installed into the directory <prefix>/bin. Use make install_docs to install the documentation and examples into <docdir>/doxygen.

<prefix> defaults to /usr/local but can be changed with the –prefix option of the configure script. The default <docdir> directory is <prefix>/share/doc/packages and can be changed with the –docdir option of the configure script.

Alternatively, you can also copy the binaries from the bin directory manually to some bin directory in your search path. This is sufficient to use doxygen.

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 DEP package, then please follow the standard installation procedure that is required for these packages.

Known compilation problems for UNIX

Qt problems

The Qt include files and libraries are not a subdirectory of the directory pointed to by QTDIR on some systems (for instance on Red Hat 6.0 includes are in /usr/include/qt and libs are in /usr/lib).

The solution: go to the root of the doxygen distribution and do:

mkdir qt
cd qt
ln -s your-qt-include-dir-here include
ln -s your-qt-lib-dir-here lib
ln -s your-qt-bin-dir-here bin
export QTDIR=$PWD

If you have a csh-like shell you should use setenv QTDIR $PWD instead of the export command above.

Now install doxygen as described above.

Bison problems

Versions 1.31 to 1.34 of bison contain a "bug" that results in a compiler errors like this:

ce_parse.cpp:348: member `class CPPValue yyalloc::yyvs' with constructor not allowed in union

This problem has been solved in version 1.35 (versions before 1.31 will also work).

Latex problems

The file a4wide.sty is not available for all distributions. If your distribution does not have it please select another paper type in the config file (see the PAPER_TYPE tag in the config file).

HP-UX & Digital UNIX problems

If you are compiling for HP-UX with aCC and you get this error:

/opt/aCC/lbin/ld: Unsatisfied symbols:
alloca (code)

then you should (according to Anke Selig) edit ce_parse.cpp and replace

extern "C" {
  void *alloca (unsigned int);
};

with

#include <alloca.h>  

If that does not help, try removing ce_parse.cpp and let bison rebuild it (this worked for me).

If you are compiling for Digital UNIX, the same problem can be solved (according to Barnard Schmallhof) by replacing the following in ce_parse.cpp:

    #else /* not GNU C.  */
    #if (!defined (__STDC__) && defined (sparc)) || defined (__sparc__) \
        || defined (__sparc) || defined (__sgi)
    #include <alloca.h>

with

    #else /* not GNU C.  */
    #if (!defined (__STDC__) && defined (sparc)) || defined (__sparc__) \
        || defined (__sparc) || defined (__sgi) || defined (__osf__)
    #include <alloca.h>

Alternatively, one could fix the problem at the bison side. Here is patch for bison.simple (provided by Andre Johansen):

--- bison.simple~       Tue Nov 18 11:45:53 1997
+++ bison.simple        Mon Jan 26 15:10:26 1998
@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@
 #ifdef __GNUC__
 #define alloca __builtin_alloca
 #else /* not GNU C.  */
-#if (!defined (__STDC__) && defined (sparc)) || defined (__sparc__) \
     || defined (__sparc) || defined (__sgi)
+#if (!defined (__STDC__) && defined (sparc)) || defined (__sparc__) \
     || defined (__sparc) || defined (__sgi) || defined (__alpha)
 #include <alloca.h>
 #else /* not sparc */
 #if defined (MSDOS) && !defined (__TURBOC__)

The generated scanner.cpp that comes with doxygen is build with this patch applied.

Sun compiler problems

It appears that doxygen doesn't work properly if it is compiled with Sun's C++ WorkShop 6 Compiler. I cannot verify this myself as I do not have access to a Solaris machine with this compiler. With GNU compiler it does work and installing Sun patch 111679-13 has also been reported as a way to fix the problem.

when configuring with --static I got:

Undefined                       first referenced
 symbol                             in file
dlclose                             /usr/lib/libc.a(nss_deffinder.o)
dlsym                               /usr/lib/libc.a(nss_deffinder.o)
dlopen                              /usr/lib/libc.a(nss_deffinder.o)

Manually adding -Bdynamic after the target rule in Makefile.doxygen will fix this:

$(TARGET): $(OBJECTS) $(OBJMOC) 
        $(LINK) $(LFLAGS) -o $(TARGET) $(OBJECTS) $(OBJMOC) $(LIBS) -Bdynamic

GCC compiler problems

Older versions of the GNU compiler have problems with constant strings containing characters with character codes larger than 127. Therefore the compiler will fail to compile some of the translator_xx.h files. A workaround, if you are planning to use the English translation only, is to configure doxygen with the –english-only option.

On some platforms (such as OpenBSD) using some versions of gcc with -O2 can lead to eating all memory during the compilation of files such as config.cpp. As a workaround use –debug as a configure option or omit the -O2 for the particular files in the Makefile.

Gcc versions before 2.95 may produce broken binaries due to bugs in these compilers.

Dot problems

Due to a change in the way image maps are generated, older versions of doxygen (<=1.2.17) will not work correctly with newer versions of graphviz (>=1.8.8). The effect of this incompatibility is that generated graphs in HTML are not properly clickable. For doxygen 1.3 it is recommended to use at least graphviz 1.8.10 or higher. For doxygen 1.4.7 or higher it is recommended to use GraphViz 2.8 or higher to avoid font issues.

Red Hat 9.0 problems

If you get the following error after running make

tmake error: qtools.pro:70: Syntax error

then first type

export LANG=

before running make.

Compiling from source on Windows

From version 1.7.0 onwards, build files are provided for Visual Studio 2008. Also the free (as in beer) "Express" version of Developer Studio can be used to compile doxygen. Alternatively, you can compile doxygen the UNIX way using Cygwin or MinGW.

The next step is to install bison, flex, and tar (see http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html). This packages are needed during the compilation process if you use a CVS snapshot of doxygen (the official source releases come with pre-generated sources).

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

Now start a new command shell and type

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

to unpack the sources.

Now your environment is setup to build doxygen.

Inside the doxygen-x.y.z directory you will find a winbuild directory containing a Doxygen.sln file. Open this file in Visual Studio. You can now build the Release or Debug flavor of Doxygen by right-clicking the project in the solutions explorer, and selecting Build.

Note that compiling Doxywizard currently requires Qt version 4 (see http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/qt-for-windows).

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 2.20 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 config file, then you need the Microsoft HTML help workshop. You can download it from Microsoft.

If you want to produce Qt Compressed Help files (see QHG_LOCATION) in the config 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 XemTex.

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 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.

Tools used to develop doxygen

Doxygen was developed and tested under Linux & MacOSX using the following open-source tools:

  • GCC version 3.3.6 (Linux) and 4.0.1 (MacOSX)
  • GNU flex version 2.5.33 (Linux) and 2.5.4 (MacOSX)
  • GNU bison version 1.75
  • GNU make version 3.80
  • Perl version 5.8.1
  • VIM version 6.2
  • Firefox 1.5
  • Trolltech's tmake version 1.3 (included in the distribution)
  • teTeX version 2.0.2
  • CVS 1.12.12
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