This script streamlines the process of setting up and maintaining a development environment for KDE software.

It does this by automating the process of downloading source code from the KDE source code repositories, building that source code, and installing it to your local system.

• You must have at least Perl version 5.26 installed. Most distributions include at least a minimal Perl set up, and Perl is also required for some portions of Qt and KDE software builds so it is good to have regardless.

• You must have Git installed to download KDE sources and kdesrc-build itself. Any supported version should be fine but We recommend at least version 2.26.

If using Arch Linux, you can use kdesrc-build-git AUR package.

For other distributions, you will need to make a local installation:

• Clone kdesrc-build to the folder you will use it from (assume it is ~/.local):

$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share
$ cd ~/.local/share
$ git clone https://invent.kde.org/sdk/kdesrc-build.git
$ mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
$ ln -sf ~/.local/share/kdesrc-build/kdesrc-build ~/.local/bin
# Make sure that the directory "~/.local/bin" is in $PATH.
$ echo $PATH

• Make sure it works by running:

$ cd ~
$ kdesrc-build --version

You should see output similar to kdesrc-build 22.07 (v22.07-577-g469df9b).

Now that kdesrc-build is installed and works, you need to set up kdesrc-build to work appropriately on your particular system.

$ kdesrc-build --initial-setup

This will install the distribution packages dependencies required by kdesrc-build, generate a configuration file.

$ kdesrc-build --metadata-only

This will download information describing the KDE source repositories and their dependencies, which will help kdesrc-build figure out what to build.

kdesrc-build will maintain this automatically, but running this step separately helps to verify that kdesrc-build can properly reach the KDE source repository and allows the --pretend option in the next step to provide more accurate output.

$ kdesrc-build --pretend

This will have kdesrc-build go through the steps that it would perform, but without actually doing them. kdesrc-build will do some basic pre-checks in this stage to ensure that required command-line commands are available, including cmake, git, qmake, and others.

This is the last good chance to make sure that kdesrc-build is set the way you want it. If this command gives you a message that all modules were successfully built, you can move onto the next step.

$ kdesrc-build dolphin

This will build Dolphin, the Plasma file manager and its KDE-based dependencies. We choose Dolphin since it is a good test case to exercise the whole build process.

For each module built, kdesrc-build will complete these steps:

• Update source code (initial download or later update)
• Set up the build system and configure source code with your options, if needed
• Perform the build, if needed
• Install the module

Hopefully everything will go well the first time, and kdesrc-build will be able to download and build all the modules that you ask for.

This is only a very cursory guide. For more information please see the KDE Community Get Involved/Development page.

kdesrc-build includes a limited command-line description with the --help option.

You can read the kdesrc-build handbook online.

Once you've set up a KDE development environment, kdesrc-build itself can generate and build documentation (a handbook and a man page).

The handbook would be available in KHelpCenter (help:/kdesrc-build), while the man page would be available in the KDE man pages or in the kdesrc-build build directory:

$ cd ~/kde/build/kdesrc-build/doc
$ man ./kdesrc-build.1

For each build, kdesrc-build does several things:

• Finds the configuration file (based on the --rc-file option or by looking for kdesrc-buildrc in the current directory and falling back to ~/.config/kdesrc-buildrc)
• Reads the configuration file to generate:
  • Default options to apply for each module
  • A list of modules to build. Modules can be grouped in "module-sets", but kdesrc-build converts each set to a list of modules.
• Reduces the module list to modules chosen on the command line (either by name or through options like --resume-from).
• For modules known to be KDE repositories (derived from a module-set using the special kde-projects repository):
  • If --include-dependencies is enabled, adds needed KDE modules into the build, then
  • Reorders KDE modules with respect to each other to ensure they are built in dependency order.
• Builds each module in the resulting list of modules. This is broken into "phases", and each phase's output is logged to a specific directory for inspection later (by default, ~/kde/src/log).

kdesrc-build takes some pains to do perform source code updates and builds in the way that a developer really would at the command line, using the same git, cmake, make commands a user would. This means that users are free to explore the source directory and build directory for a module without trampling on additional data maintained by kdesrc-build: kdesrc-build does nothing special in either the source or build directories.

These options are the most useful. Others are documented at the kdesrc-build online handbook.