Manually installing Boost

Manually installing Boost

To manually install the Boost libraries, you need a C++ compiler. But since you also need a C++ compiler to compile Shadowfax, this should not be a problem.

The first step is to download the desired version of Boost from the Boost sourceforge page. Which version is not really important, although it should be at least version 1.53.0. And beta versions are not recommended. Download one of the compressed source folders, e.g. boost_1_59_0.tar.gz.

Unpack the compressed folder into a folder of your liking. Then go into the main Boost folder, e.g. boost_1_59_0 and run the following command

./bootstrap.sh

This will set up some necessary variables required by the compilation process.

We recommend installing Boost in a subfolder of the main Boost folder, e.g. build. Create this folder, and then run the following command from the main Boost folder:

./b2 install --prefix=PREFIX

where PREFIX corresponds to the absolute path to the build folder you just created, e.g. /home/username/Programs/boost_1_59_0/build/. This will compile the entire library and will take a while.

When you want to compile Shadowfax using your manual installation of Boost, you need to specify this as a cmake parameter:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBOOST_ROOT=PREFIX

where PREFIX is the same as specified above. This will force cmake to start looking for the Boost libraries in that specific directory, and hence cause it to detect the correct version of Boost. This also works if you have an older version of Boost already installed on you system.