Building and Testing

Dependencies

Awesome has the following dependencies (besides a more-or-less standard POSIX environment):

CMake >= 3.0.0
Lua >= 5.1.0 or LuaJIT
LGI >= 0.8.0
xproto >= 7.0.15
libxcb >= 1.6 with support for the RandR, XTest, Xinerama, SHAPE and XKB extensions
libxcb-cursor
libxcb-util >= 0.3.8
libxcb-keysyms >= 0.3.4
libxcb-icccm >= 0.3.8
libxcb-xfixes
xcb-util-xrm >= 1.0
libxkbcommon with X11 support enabled
libstartup-notification >= 0.10
cairo with support for XCB and GObject introspection
Pango with support for Cairo and GObject introspection
GLib >= 2.40 with support for GObject introspection
GIO with support for GObject introspection
GdkPixbuf
libX11 with xcb support
Imagemagick's convert utility
libxdg-basedir >= 1.0.0

Additionally, the following optional dependencies exist:

DBus for DBus integration and the awesome-client utility
asciidoctor for generating man pages
gzip for compressing man pages
ldoc >= 1.4.5 for generating the documentation
busted for running unit tests
luacheck for static code analysis
LuaCov for collecting code coverage information
libexecinfo on systems where libc does not provide backtrace_symbols() to generate slightly better backtraces on crashes
Xephyr or Xvfb for running integration tests
GTK+ >= 3.10 for ./themes/gtk/
xcb-errors for pretty-printing of X11 errors
libRSVG for displaying SVG files without scaling artifacts
wmctrl for testing WM interactions with external actions
xterm for various test cases

Building

With all dependencies installed, run the following commands within the root of the repository to build and install Awesome on your system:

make
sudo make install

Create packages

To ease installation management, you can pack Awesome into .deb or .rpm packages. The following command will build the correct package for your system's package manager:

make package

To install the package, run one of the following commands:

sudo dpkg -i awesome-x.y.z.deb
# or
sudo rpm -Uvh awesome-x.y.z.rpm

Customizing build options

Awesome allows customizing various aspects of the build process through CMake variables. To change these variables, pass the CMAKE_ARGS environment variable to make with CMake flags as content (see cmake -h).

Here is an example:

CMAKE_ARGS="-DLUA_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/lua5.3" make

Note:

CMake arguments only need to be specified on the first run of make or after make distclean.

Skip documentation

The CMake variables GENERATE_DOC and GENERATE_MANPAGES toggle generation of HTML documentation and man pages respectively. They are enabled by default but can be set to OFF.

CMAKE_ARGS="-DGENERATE_DOC=OFF -DGENERATE_MANPAGES=OFF" make

Change the Lua version

Both the build steps and the final binary require a working Lua interpreter. To change the Lua interpreter that both the build process and Awesome should use, specify an absolute path to a lua binary for LUA_EXECUTABLE and values that match the binary's version for LUA_LIBRARY and LUA_INCLUDE_DIR.

Example to build on Arch Linux:

CMAKE_ARGS="-DLUA_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/lua5.3 -DLUA_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/liblua.so.5.3 -DLUA_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/lua5.3" make

Additional options

Additional variables can be found through CMake. Run the following command to print a list of all available variables, including the ones explained above:

cmake -B build -L

Testing

Once Awesome has been built, you can run various test suites to verify functionality for both the binary and the Lua library. Make sure to install applicable dependencies as outlined at the top.

Full test suite:

make check

Individual test categories can be run as well:

make check-integration: Run integration tests within a Xephyr session.
make check-qa: Run luacheck against the Lua library
make check-unit: Run unit tests with busted against the Lua library. You can also run busted <options> ./spec if you want to specify options for busted.
make check-requires: Check for invalid require() calls.
make check-examples: Run integration tests within the examples in ./tests/examples.
make check-themes: Test themes.