This section will introduce the process of building and defining a library to reuse it in a bigger project using Webinizer.
The process of building a library module is similar to that described in the :ref:`build-a-simple-project` section. We'll take the demo project Ncurses, which is a library that allows the programmer to write text-based user interfaces (TUI) in a terminal-independent manner, as an example to go through the processes.
Select the Ncurses demo project from Get started page. Click the checkbox of Check the box if the project is a library. at the bottom as we are building a library module.
Navigate to the Build steps page to define build target and build steps. Set build target as static and accept the recommended build steps from Webinizer. As a library, we'd like to install the library files after a successful build. Click the ADD STEP button to add another step make install. Choose Build tools type as make and add Arguments for build as install, then click the SAVE button.
Navigate to the Build page and click the BUILD button to trigger our first build. We'll be prompted with two recipes generated from Webinizer pre-build checks:
- Recipe for main loop issue: the Ncurses library doesn't have the main loop issue, so we can click the
IGNOREbutton to dismiss this recipe. - Recipe for pthread support: the detected pthreads usage in the Ncurses library are from test files, so we can also click the
IGNOREbutton to proceed.
After these recipes are dismissed, we can click the BUILD button for a second build.
This build will take a longer time so we can check the live build log to understand the build status. After a while, another recipe on building intermedium tools with native compiler other than Emscripten issue appears. As per the suggestion shown, for Ncurses library, we need to enable cross-platform compiling and use gcc to build these tools to solve this issue. We can add arguments to the configure build step to achieve this.
Navigate back to the Build Steps page and click the MANAGE STEPS button to enable editing build steps at first. Then add the arguments --build=x86_64-pc-emscripten --host=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu to the Arguments for build field of Step 1 configure. Click the FINISH button to save the changes.
Navigate to the Build page and click the BUILD button for a third build. A recipe on strip issue is generated by Webinizer. Similar as the previous action, we can follow the suggestions from the recipe and add the argument --disable-stripping to Step 1 configure in Build Steps page.
Navigate to the Build page and click the BUILD button for a fourth build. A recipe on C++ exception issue is generated by Webinizer. We can click IGNORE button on the recipe to dismiss it as the usage of C++ exception catching is detected from demos, which is not related to the core library.
Click the BUILD button for a fifth build. If everything goes well, after a while, we'll be notified a successful build from Webinizer. We can click the Library tab from build results section to view the built library files.
After building a library successfully, an important additional step required is to define the package configurations and native library information that will be utilized by other projects depending on this library. Click the Package & Native library info section in the Config page will navigate us to the configuration section.
For Ncurses library, we'd define the package configurations as below for the static build target. Note that if multiple targets are defined, we should set the package configurations for each target respectively. Detailed explanations of the package configurations fields are available in :ref:`package-configs-explaination`.
- Prefix:
${projectRoot}/webinizer_build - Compiler flags:
'-I${prefix}/include' - Linker flags:
'-L${prefix}/lib' -lncurses '--preload-file ${prefix}/lib/terminfo@/home/web_user/.terminfo'
In addition, we also need to set the native library information with name and version. Below is the example for Ncurses library.
- name:
ncurses - version:
6.1.20180127
After all the fields are filled in correctly, we have now completed defining the Ncurses library.