LilyPond Contributor's Guide: 2.3 Compiling with lilydev

## 2.3 Compiling with lilydev

Lilydev is our ‘remix’ of Ubuntu which contains all the necessary dependencies to do lilypond development; for more information, see Lilydev.

#### Preparing the build

To prepare the build directory, enter (or copy&paste) the below text. This should take less than a minute.

>     cd ~/lilypond-git/
>     sh autogen.sh --noconfigure
>     mkdir -p build/
>     cd build/
>     ../configure

#### Building `lilypond`

Compiling lilypond will likely take between 5 and 60 minutes, depending on your computer’s speed and available RAM. We recommend that you minimize the terminal window while it is building; this can have a non-negligible effect on compilation speed.

>     cd ~/lilypond-git/build/
>     make

You may run the compiled `lilypond` with:

>     cd ~/lilypond-git/build/
>     out/bin/lilypond my-file.ly

#### Building the documentation

Compiling the documentation is a much more involved process, and will likely take 2 to 10 hours.

>     cd ~/lilypond-git/build/
>     make doc

The documentation is put in ‘`out-www/offline-root/`’. You may view the html files by entering the below text; we recommend that you bookmark the resulting page:

>     firefox ~/lilypond-git/build/out-www/offline-root/index.html

#### Installing

Don’t. There is no reason to install lilypond within lilydev. All development work can (and should) stay within the ‘`$HOME/lilypond-git/`’ directory, and any personal composition or typesetting work should be done with an official GUB release.

#### Problems and other options

To select different build options, or isolate certain parts of the build, or to use multiple CPUs while building, read Compiling.

In particular, contributors working on the documentation should be aware of some bugs in the build system, and should read the workarounds in Generating documentation.

#### LilyPond — Contributor’s Guide