Build From Sources

Requirements

To compile LibrePCB, you need to install the following tools & libraries first:

Actually LibrePCB 1.2.0 still compiles with Qt5, but unfortunately contains a serious bug at runtime. Therefore you really need to use Qt6 where the bug doesn’t exist. We’ll drop support for Qt5 soon anyway.

Get the Sources

It is very important to use the correct sources:

  • Do NOT clone any branch (e.g. master) from our repository on GitHub! These sources are not compatible with the stable file format of LibrePCB.

  • Do NOT use the archives provided at the GitHub Releases page. These do not include the submodules and thus can’t be compiled.

  • It’s fine to clone the official release tag (current: 1.2.0) from our repository on GitHub, just keep in mind to pass --recursive to also get all the submodules.

For convenience, we provide an official source archive which contains all the required files (including submodules) and has stripped any unnecessary files: librepcb-1.2.0-source.zip

wget "https://download.librepcb.org/releases/1.2.0/librepcb-1.2.0-source.zip"
unzip ./librepcb-1.2.0-source.zip
cd ./librepcb-1.2.0

Build LibrePCB

Within the downloaded source directory, execute the following commands:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j8

Additional Resources

These are just the most important commands. For more details (e.g. the available configuration flags), check out the following resources: