This guide has been tested with Fedora 36 1.1 x86_64. Please read it in full before you proceed to familiarize yourself with the build procedure.
Several other distributions have specific build guides and a general Linux build guide is also available.
This guide assumes you are using terminal, also known as console, command-line or simply cli. Commands need to be run at the terminal, one at a time and in the provided order.
This is a comment that provides context:
this is a command
this is another command
and yet another one
Example: Clone Kodi's current master branch:
git clone https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc kodi
Commands that contain strings enclosed in angle brackets denote something you need to change to suit your needs.
git clone -b <branch-name> https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc kodi
Example: Clone Kodi's current Krypton branch:
git clone -b Krypton https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc kodi
Several different strategies are used to draw your attention to certain pieces of information. In order of how critical the information is, these items are marked as a note, tip, or warning. For example:
Note
Linux is user friendly... It's just very particular about who its friends are.
Tip
Algorithm is what developers call code they do not want to explain.
Warning
Developers don't change light bulbs. It's a hardware problem.
back to top | back to section top
Make sure git is installed:
sudo dnf install git
Clone Kodi's current master branch:
cd $HOME
git clone https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc kodi
If you get a package not found type of message with the below command, remove the offending package(s) from the install list and reissue the command. Take a note of the missing dependencies and, after a successful step completion, build the missing dependencies manually.
Note
Kodi requires a compiler with C++17 support, i.e. gcc >= 7 or clang >= 5
Install build dependencies:
sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel autoconf automake avahi-compat-libdns_sd-devel avahi-devel bluez-libs-devel bzip2-devel cmake curl dbus-devel exiv2-devel flatbuffers flatbuffers-devel fmt-devel fontconfig-devel freetype-devel fribidi-devel fstrcmp-devel gawk gcc gcc-c++ gettext gettext-devel giflib-devel gperf gtest-devel java-11-openjdk-headless jre lcms2-devel libao-devel libass-devel libbluray-devel libcap-devel libcdio-devel libcec-devel libcurl-devel libidn2-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel libmicrohttpd-devel libmpc-devel libnfs-devel libplist-devel libpng12-devel libsmbclient-devel libtool libtool-ltdl-devel libudev-devel libunistring libunistring-devel libusb-devel libuuid-devel libva-devel libvdpau-devel libxkbcommon-devel libxml2-devel libXmu-devel libXrandr-devel libxslt-devel libXt-devel lirc-devel lzo-devel make mariadb-devel mesa-libEGL-devel mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libGLU-devel mesa-libGLw-devel mesa-libOSMesa-devel nasm openssl-devel openssl-libs patch pcre2-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel python3-devel python3-pillow rapidjson-devel shairplay-devel spdlog-devel sqlite-devel swig taglib-devel tinyxml-devel tinyxml2-devel trousers-devel uuid-devel zlib-devel
Warning
Make sure you copy paste the entire line or you might receive an error or miss a few dependencies.
Building for Wayland requires some extra packages:
sudo dnf install mesa-libGLES-devel wayland-devel waylandpp-devel wayland-protocols-devel
Similarly, building for GBM also requires some extra packages:
sudo dnf install libinput-devel libxkbcommon-devel mesa-libGLES-devel mesa-libgbm-devel
Optional packages that you might want to install for extra functionality (generating doxygen documentation, for instance):
sudo dnf install doxygen mariadb-devel
Note
For developers and anyone else who builds frequently it is recommended to install ccache to expedite subsequent builds of Kodi.
You can install it with:
sudo dnf install ccache
Tip
If you have multiple computers at home, distcc will distribute build workloads of C and C++ code across several machines on a network. Team Kodi may not be willing to give support if problems arise using such a build configuration.
You can install it with:
sudo dnf install distcc
See the general Linux build guide for reference.