Chapter 2. Installation

Table of Contents

Installing from sources

    Getting the source code
    Requirements
    Database setup
    Compiling and installing

Installing from sources

Currently, the only intended way to install Matita is starting from its source
code.

Getting the source code

You can get the Matita source code in two ways:

 1. go to the download page and get the latest released source tarball;

 2. get the development sources from our SVN repository. You will need the
    components/ and matita/ directories from the trunk/helm/software/
    directory, plus the configure and Makefile* stuff from the same directory.

    In this case you will need to run autoconf before proceding with the
    building instructions below.

Requirements

In order to build Matita from sources you will need some tools and libraries.
They are listed below.

Note for Debian users

If you are running a Debian GNU/Linux distribution you can have APT install all
the required tools and libraries by adding the following repository to your /
etc/apt/sources.list:

              deb http://people.debian.org/~zack unstable helm


and installing the helm-matita-deps package.

Required tools and libraries

OCaml

    the Objective Caml compiler, version 3.09 or above

Findlib

    OCaml package manager, version 1.1.1 or above

OCaml Expat

    OCaml bindings for the expat library

GMetaDOM

    OCaml bindings for the Gdome 2 library

OCaml HTTP

    OCaml library to write HTTP daemons (and clients)

LablGTK

    OCaml bindings for the GTK+ library , version 2.6.0 or above

GtkMathView , LablGtkMathView

    GTK+ widget to render MathML documents and its OCaml bindings

GtkSourceView , LablGtkSourceView

    extension for the GTK+ text widget (adding the typical features of source
    code editors) and its OCaml bindings

MySQL , OCaml MySQL

    SQL database and OCaml bindings for its client-side library

    The SQL database itself is not strictly needed to run Matita, but we
    stronly encourage its use since a lot of features are disabled without it.
    Still, the OCaml bindings of the library are needed at compile time.

Ocamlnet

    collection of OCaml libraries to deal with application-level Internet
    protocols and conventions

ulex

    Unicode lexer generator for OCaml

CamlZip

    OCaml library to access .gz files

Database setup

To fully exploit Matita indexing and search capabilities you will need a
working MySQL database. Detalied instructions on how to do it can be found in
the MySQL documentation. Here you can find a quick howto.

In order to create a database you need administrator permissions on your MySQL
installation, usually the root account has them. Once you have the permissions,
a new database can be created executing mysqladmin create matita (matita is the
default database name, you can change it using the db.user key of the
configuration file).

Then you need to grant the necessary access permissions to the database user of
Matita, typing echo "grant all privileges on matita.* to helm;" | mysql matita
should do the trick (helm is the default user name used by Matita to access the
database, you can change it using the db.user key of the configuration file).

Note

This way you create a database named matita on which anyone claiming to be the
helm user can do everything (like adding dummy data or destroying the contained
one). It is strongly suggested to apply more fine grained permissions, how to
do it is out of the scope of this manual.

Compiling and installing

Once you get the source code the installations steps should be quite familiar.

First of all you need to configure the build process executing ./configure.
This will check that all needed tools and library are installed and prepare the
sources for compilation and installation.

Quite a few (optional) arguments may be passed to the configure command line to
change build time parameters. They are listed in the table below, together with
their default values.

Table 2.1.  configure command line arguments

┌──────────────────┬─────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│     Argument     │ Default │                  Description                   │
├──────────────────┼─────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│--with-runtime-dir│/usr/    │Runtime base directory where all Matita stuff   │
│=dir              │local/   │(executables, configuration files, standard     │
│                  │matita/  │library, ...) will be installed                 │
├──────────────────┼─────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                  │         │Default SQL server hostname. Will be used while │
│                  │         │building the standard library during the        │
│--with-dbhost=host│localhost│installation and to create the default Matita   │
│                  │         │configuration. May be changed later in          │
│                  │         │configuration file.                             │
├──────────────────┼─────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│--enable-debug    │disabled │Enable debugging code. Not for the casual user. │
└──────────────────┴─────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Then you will manage the build and install process using make as usual. Below
are reported the targets you have to invoke in sequence to build and install.

make targets

world

    builds components needed by Matita and Matita itself (in bytecode only or
    in both bytecode and native code depending on the availability of the OCaml
    native code compiler)

library

    uses the (just built) matitac compiler to build the Matita standard
    library.

    For this step you will need a working SQL database (for indexing the
    standard library while you are compiling it). See Database setup for
    instructions on how to set it up.

install

    installs Matita related tools, standard library and the needed runtime
    stuff in the proper places on the filesystem