Compile and Install

How to do compilation and installation of GRASS 6?

Here we explain the procedure to compile GRASS from CVS, but it also applies to official GRASS 6 releases. For installation of for binary packages, see instead Installation Guide.

For detailed information on compilation, please see the INSTALL file in the source code.

Prerequisites

GRASS needs at least two extra libraries:

• PROJ4 for management of projections
• GDAL/OGR for reading and writing various GIS data formats (interoperability)

You have to install these two libraries first.

Compilation and installation procedure

• checkout the grass6 module from cvs (read http://grass.itc.it/faq/cvs_howto.html grass CVS howto instructions)
• It is wise that compilation processes are carried out as a normal user: If you want to get the source code in a place where you do not have write permissions (e.g. in /usr/local/src/cvs) just follow this:

     cd /usr/local/src/cvs 
     su -c 'mkdir grass6'
     su -c 'chown yourlogin:yourgroup grass6'

• do a checkout (co) of the repository

     cvs -z3 co grass6

• in the grass6 directory, you will find the precious INSTALL file, open it with your favourite pager/editor and read it carefully!
• run configure with parameters to adapt the compile process to your own system. To see what options can be passed to it, run configure --help. The minimum set of configure parameters is (refers to GRASS 6 from CVS, not to 6.x release):

     ./configure

It may (!) look like this:

     ./configure \
         --with-cxx \
         --with-sqlite \
         --with-postgres-libs=/usr/include/pgsql/libpq --with-postgres-includes=/usr/include/pgsql \
         --with-freetype --with-freetype-includes=/usr/include/freetype2 \
         --with-motif --with-glw

Please note that the paths mentioned may widely vary due to the distribution used

• Let's compile it (takes a little while...)!

     make

• Once the installation process is finished, you're ready to install GRASS system wide.

     su -c 'make install'

• enjoy GRASS:

     grass61

What else?

If you want to use QGIS, then also compile the GRASS-GDAL/OGR plugin:

• Compile and install GRASS and QGIS with GDAL/OGR Plugin (enables QGIS to read GRASS data directly)