Getting Started — Jansson v1.1.1 documentation

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# Getting Started

## Compiling and Installing Jansson

The Jansson source is available at http://www.digip.org/jansson/releases/.

Unpack the source tarball and change to the source directory:

    bunzip2 -c jansson-1.1.1.tar.bz2 | tar xf -
    cd jansson-1.1.1

The source uses GNU Autotools (autoconf, automake, libtool), so compiling and installing is extremely simple:

    ./configure
    make
    make check
    make install

To change the destination directory (`/usr/local` by default), use the `--prefix=DIR` argument to `./configure`. See `./configure --help` for the list of all possible installation options. (There are no options to customize the resulting Jansson binary.)

The command `make check` runs the test suite distributed with Jansson. Python is required to run the tests. This step is not strictly necessary, but it may find possible problems that Jansson has on your platform. If any problems are found, please report them.

If you obtained the source from a Git repository (or any other source control system), there’s no `./configure` script as it’s not kept in version control. To create the script, Autotools needs to be bootstrapped. There are many ways to do this, but the easiest one is to use `autoreconf`:

    autoreconf -vi

This command creates the `./configure` script, which can then be used as described in the previous section.

### Installing Prebuilt Binary Packages

Binary `.deb` packages for Ubuntu are available in this PPA at Launchpad. Follow the instructions in the PPA (“Technical details about this PPA” link) to take the PPA into use. Then install the -dev package:

    sudo apt-get install libjansson-dev

### Building the Documentation

(This subsection describes how to build the HTML documentation you are currently reading, so it can be safely skipped.)

Documentation is in the `doc/` subdirectory. It’s written in reStructuredText with Sphinx annotations. To generate the HTML documentation, invoke:

    cd doc/
    sphinx-build . .build/html

... and point your browser to `.build/html/index.html`. Sphinx is required to generate the documentation.

## Compiling Programs Using Jansson

Jansson involves one C header file, `jansson.h`, so it’s enough to put the line

    #include <jansson.h>

in the beginning of every source file that uses Jansson.

There’s also just one library to link with, `libjansson`. Compile and link the program as follows:

    cc -o prog prog.c -ljansson

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