This file describes how to compile and install CUPS from source code. For more
information on CUPS see the file called README.md
.
Using CUPS requires additional third-party support software and printer drivers. These are typically included with your operating system distribution.
You'll need ANSI-compliant C and C++ compilers, plus a make program and POSIX- compliant shell (/bin/sh). The GNU compiler tools and Bash work well and we have tested the current CUPS code against several versions of Clang and GCC with excellent results.
The makefiles used by the project should work with POSIX-compliant versions of
make
. We've tested them with GNU make as well as several vendor make programs.
BSD users should use GNU make (gmake
) since BSD make is not POSIX-compliant
and does not support the include
directive.
Besides these tools you'll want ZLIB for compression support, Avahi for mDNS support, LIBUSB for USB printing support, the GNU TLS library for encryption support on platforms other than iOS, macOS, or Windows, and PAM for authentication support. CUPS will compile and run without these, however you'll miss out on many of the features provided by CUPS.
Note: Kerberos support is deprecated starting with CUPS 2.4.0 and will be removed in a future version of CUPS. To build CUPS with Kerberos support, specify the "--enable-gssapi" configure option below.
On a stock Ubuntu install, the following command will install the required prerequisites:
sudo apt-get install autoconf build-essential libavahi-client-dev \
libgnutls28-dev libkrb5-dev libnss-mdns libpam-dev \
libsystemd-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev zlib1g-dev
CUPS uses GNU autoconf, so you should find the usual "configure" script in the main CUPS source directory. To configure CUPS for your system, type:
./configure
The default installation will put the CUPS software in the "/etc", "/usr", and
"/var" directories on your system, which will overwrite any existing printing
commands on your system. Use the --prefix
option to install the CUPS software
in another location:
./configure --prefix=/some/directory
To see a complete list of configuration options, use the --help
option:
./configure --help
If any of the dependent libraries are not installed in a system default location
(typically "/usr/include" and "/usr/lib") you'll need to set the CFLAGS
,
CPPFLAGS
, CXXFLAGS
, DSOFLAGS
, and LDFLAGS
environment variables prior to
running configure:
setenv CFLAGS "-I/some/directory"
setenv CPPFLAGS "-I/some/directory"
setenv CXXFLAGS "-I/some/directory"
setenv DSOFLAGS "-L/some/directory"
setenv LDFLAGS "-L/some/directory"
./configure ...
or:
CFLAGS="-I/some/directory" \
CPPFLAGS="-I/some/directory" \
CXXFLAGS="-I/some/directory" \
DSOFLAGS="-L/some/directory" \
LDFLAGS="-L/some/directory" \
./configure ...
The --enable-debug
option compiles CUPS with debugging information enabled.
Additional debug logging support can be enabled using the
--enable-debug-printfs
option - these debug messages are enabled using the
CUPS_DEBUG_xxx
environment variables at run-time.
CUPS also includes an extensive set of unit tests that can be used to find and diagnose a variety of common problems - use the "--enable-unit-tests" configure option to run them at build time.
Once you have configured things, just type:
make
or if you have FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD type:
gmake
to build the software.
Aside from the built-in unit tests, CUPS includes an automated test framework for testing the entire printing system. To run the tests, just type:
make test
or if you have FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD type:
gmake test
The test framework runs a copy of the CUPS scheduler (cupsd) on port 8631 in "/tmp/cups-$USER" and produces a nice HTML report of the results.
Once you have built the software you need to install it. The "install" target provides a quick way to install the software on your local system:
make install
or for FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD:
gmake install
Use the BUILDROOT
variable to install to an alternate root directory:
make BUILDROOT=/some/other/root/directory install
You can also build binary packages that can be installed on other machines using the RPM spec file ("packaging/cups.spec") or EPM list file ("packaging/cups.list"). The latter also supports building of binary RPMs, so it may be more convenient to use.
You can find the RPM software at http://www.rpm.org/.
The EPM software is available at https://jimjag.github.io/epm/.
The top level makefile supports generation of many types of binary distributions using EPM. To build a binary distribution type:
make FORMAT
or
gmake FORMAT
for FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. The "FORMAT" target is one of the following:
- "epm": Builds a script + tarfile package
- "bsd": Builds a *BSD package
- "deb": Builds a Debian package
- "pkg": Builds a Solaris package
- "rpm": Builds a RPM package
- "slackware": Build a Slackware package
When configured with the --enable-debug-printfs
option, CUPS compiles in
additional debug logging support in the scheduler, CUPS API, and CUPS Imaging
API. The following environment variables are used to enable and control debug
logging:
CUPS_DEBUG_FILTER
: Specifies a POSIX regular expression to control which messages are logged.CUPS_DEBUG_LEVEL
: Specifies a number from 0 to 9 to control the verbosity of the logging. The default level is 1.CUPS_DEBUG_LOG
: Specifies a log file to use. Specify the name "-" to send the messages to stderr. Prefix a filename with "+" to append to an existing file. You can include a single "%d" in the filename to embed the current process ID.