gst-build

GStreamer meson based repositories aggregrator

You can build GStreamer and all its modules at once using meson and its subproject feature.

Getting started

Install meson and ninja

Meson 0.48 or newer is required.

You should get meson through your package manager or using:

$ pip3 install --user meson

This will install meson into ~/.local/bin which may or may not be included automatically in your PATH by default.

If you are building on Windows, do not use the Meson MSI installer since it is experimental and will likely not work.

You can also run meson directly from a meson git checkout if you like.

You should get ninja using your package manager or download the official release and put it in your PATH.

Build GStreamer and its modules

You can get all GStreamer built running:

mkdir build/ && meson build && ninja -C build/

NOTE: on fedora (and maybe other distributions) replace ninja with ninja-build

Development environment

Building the Qt5 QML plugin

If qmake is not in PATH and pkgconfig files are not available, you can point the QMAKE env var to the Qt5 installation of your choosing before running meson as shown above.

The plugin will be automatically enabled if possible, but you can ensure that it is built by passing -Dgst-plugins-good:qt5=enabled to meson. This will cause Meson to error out if the plugin could not be enabled. This also works for all plugins in all GStreamer repositories.

Uninstalled environment

gst-build also contains a special uninstalled target that lets you enter an uninstalled development environment where you will be able to work on GStreamer easily. You can get into that environment running:

ninja -C build/ uninstalled

If your operating system handles symlinks, built modules source code will be available at the root of gst-build/ for example GStreamer core will be in gstreamer/. Otherwise they will be present in subprojects/. You can simply hack in there and to rebuild you just need to rerun ninja -C build/.

NOTE: In the uninstalled environment, a fully usable prefix is also configured in gst-build/prefix where you can install any extra dependency/project.

Update git subprojects

We added a special update target to update subprojects (it uses git pull --rebase meaning you should always make sure the branches you work on are following the right upstream branch, you can set it with git branch --set-upstream-to origin/master if you are working on gst-build master branch).

Update all GStreamer modules and rebuild:

ninja -C build/ update

Update all GStreamer modules without rebuilding:

ninja -C build/ git-update

Custom subprojects

We also added a meson option, 'custom_subprojects', that allows the user to provide a comma-separated list of subprojects that should be built alongside the default ones.

To use it:

cd subprojects
git clone my_subproject
cd ../build
rm -rf * && meson .. -Dcustom_subprojects=my_subproject
ninja

Run tests

You can easily run the test of all the components:

meson test -C build

To list all available tests:

meson test -C build --list

To run all the tests of a specific component:

meson test -C build --suite gst-plugins-base

Or to run a specific test file:

meson test -C build/ --suite gstreamer gst_gstbuffer

Run a specific test from a specific test file:

GST_CHECKS=test_subbuffer meson test -C build/ --suite gstreamer gst_gstbuffer

Checkout another branch using worktrees

If you need to have several versions of GStreamer coexisting (eg. master and 1.14), you can use the checkout-branch-worktree script provided by gst-build. It allows you to create a new gst-build environment with new checkout of all the GStreamer modules as git worktrees.

For example to get a fresh checkout of gst-1.14 from a gst-build in master already built in a build directory you can simply run:

./checkout-branch-worktree ../gst-1.14 1.14 -C build/

Add information about GStreamer development environment in your prompt line

Bash prompt

We automatically handle bash and set $PS1 accordingly.

If the automatic $PS1 override is not desired (maybe you have a fancy custom prompt), set the $GST_BUILD_DISABLE_PS1_OVERRIDE environment variable to TRUE and use $GST_ENV when setting the custom prompt, for example with a snippet like the following:

...
if [[ -n "${GST_ENV-}" ]];
then
  PS1+="[ ${GST_ENV} ]"
fi
...

Zsh prompt

In your .zshrc, you should add something like:

export PROMPT="$GST_ENV-$PROMPT"

Fish prompt

In your ~/.config/fish/functions/fish_prompt.fish, you should add something like this at the end of the fish_prompt function body:

if set -q GST_ENV
  echo -n -s (set_color -b blue white) "(" (basename "$GST_ENV") ")" (set_color normal) " "
end

Using powerline

In your powerline theme configuration file (by default in {POWERLINE INSTALLATION DIR}/config_files/themes/shell/default.json) you should add a new environment segment as follow:

{
  "function": "powerline.segments.common.env.environment",
  "args": { "variable": "GST_ENV" },
  "priority": 50
},