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Developer Setup

Building On Unix-Like Systems​

Checkout the Build System Document

The setup is simplified by using the Nix Package Manager, and Direnv. You should use this setup on Unix-like systems, instead of trying to manually install the required tools.

Prerequisites​

You must have the C toolchain installed globally on your machine. It can be gcc or clang with their corresponding linkers.

Install Nix​

checkout the Nix documentation for more context

Nix is a package manger for Unix-like systems, which is very strict about isolating packages. It will not mess around with your existing system packages. Ideally Nix would be the only piece of software needed to build Mintter, but unfortunately some OpenGL packages, and some system libraries don't work quite well. We still leverage Nix to manage other tools and runtimes required to work with Mintter.

So, install Nix by following the official documentation for your system.

NOTE: for macOS it may be necessary to create a virtual APFS volume, because Nix expects having access to /nix directory, but macOS in recent versions doesn't allow creating directories in the root catalog. The installer should guide you through the process. For Apple Silicon machines, it may be needed to install Rosetta.

Follow the installation instructions precisely. To successfully complete the setup, you should write some information in your shell profile in order for Nix to work. It may be that the installer is able to do this setup for you, though.

To verify the installation open an empty terminal window and run:

nix-env -i hello
hello

This should run the GNU Hello program installed with Nix.

Install Direnv​

Direnv is used to configure the development environment when you open up the project directory. It's useful because it makes configuration portable between developers, and won't pollute your global environment.

You can install Direnv with Nix:

nix-env -i direnv

IMPORTANT: To complete the setup you must add direnv shell hooks to your shell profile:

eval "$(direnv hook bash)"  # for bash
eval "$(direnv hook zsh)"   # for zsh
eval (direnv hook fish)     # for fish

Make sure to add the direnv hook after Nix configuration in the shell profile.

It's highly recommended to configure your IDE to work with direnv. We have setup the corresponding extension recommendations for VS Code.

Install System Libraries (non-nixOS Linux Only)​

The setup for Linux is a bit more involved because some OpenGL libraries don't work well with Nix on non-nixOS distros.

So to compile on Linux you must have the following libraries installed:

  • libgtk-3-dev
  • libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev
  • libayatana-appindicator3-dev
  • librsvg2-dev
  • patchelf

Eventually we might be able to setup all of this be configured with Nix.

Building On Windows​

Internally, none of us uses Windows for development, but we do build for Windows on Windows machines in CI. You can inspect the corresponding GitHub Actions workflow definitions to find out what needs to be installed to compile the project.