Hello there lovely Linux user - welcome to our build instructions.
Important: Sonic Pi for Linux isn't currently officially supported and we can't guarantee that it will work on all variants of Linux on all hardware. However, we provide these instructions in the hope that they can help you get Sonic Pi running on your specific Linux distribution.
These instructions are for people wanting to build/compile their own version of Sonic Pi. If you're just looking to install it it might be the case that a kind maintainer has already done this work for you and packaged it up for your Linux distribution. If you just want to get started as quickly as possible it might be worth checking your distribution's package system to see if a package is already available. However, if you want to use the absolute latest development version or get involved with modifying and changing the source code, you'll need to build things yourself and hopefully this document will help you do just that.
OK, so just to get you prepared, we're going to do a few things:
- Install the various dependencies that Sonic Pi needs both to be built and to run
- Prepare the build by running some command scripts
- Build Sonic Pi using
cmake
- Start your new Sonic Pi using your newly built app
- If you have any issues building Sonic Pi on Linux please open up an issue on GitHub and we'll try our best to assist you: https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/issues
- If you're running Raspberry Pi OS, please see our other help file
BUILD-RASPBERRY_PI.md
for more specific instructions. - These build instructions assume you're running under a Debian-based Linux. You may need to modify the package names and other aspects to match your specific Linux distribution.
In order to build Sonic Pi's various components, we need to install a few dependencies:
- Build Tools (c++ compiler, cmake, git.)
- Qt + Dev tools (6+)
- Pipewire
- Ruby + Dev tools (2.5+)
- Elixir + Dev tools (12.0+)
- SuperCollider + SC3 plugins
Note: please make sure that you have gcc12 installed. Compiling vcpkg dependencies does not work with gcc13 currently
The following is a rough list of Debian packages that are needed that can serve as a starting position:
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential git libssl-dev ruby-dev elixir erlang-dev erlang-xmerl qt6-tools-dev qt6-tools-dev-tools libqt6svg6-dev libqt6opengl6-dev supercollider-server sc3-plugins-server alsa-utils libasound2-dev cmake ninja-build pipewire-jack libspa-0.2-jack qt6-wayland libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libx11-dev libxft-dev libxext-dev qpwgraph compton
Notes:
- Check the version of
Qt
after package installation.
- Check your current Qt version with
qmake --version
. - If it is too old (see dependency list above) you should find a way to update
Qt
before going to the build step.
- The main repositories may not have a recent enough version of Elixir. If this is the case, you can install it via one of the following methods:
- Run
app/pi-install-elixir.sh
to install it using ASDF - Get newer packaged versions of Elixir from Erlang Solutions' repository (though installing packages from outside your distros main repository is at your own risk!)
- Build and install it yourself
There is an Audinux Copr repositoryhttps://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ycollet/audinux/package/sonic-pi/) with Sonic-Pi.
Once we have installed all the dependencies, we're almost ready to build Sonic Pi. However, we must first grab a copy of Sonic Pi's source code.
Note: if you would like to either try the unsupported development version, likely because you want to help with development
then pull the latest from the dev
branch. Otherwise stick to the stable
branch or one of the tags.
The easiest way of getting this is likely to be cloning from GitHub
into a folder on your hard drive such as ~/Development/sonic-pi
:
git clone https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi.git ~/Development/sonic-pi
If you don't have Git installed you should be able to download a .zip
file of the latest commit or specific release (v3.3+) you'd like to
build:
https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/archive/main.zip
From now on these instructions will assume you downloaded the source
into ~/Development/sonic-pi
. If you used a different location be sure to
change any future references to ~/Development/sonic-pi
to your chosen location.
Now we're ready to build everything. This is achieved with one single command which will:
- Run the prebuild script which builds and sets up a lot of the dependencies.
- Run the config script to set up the build system.
- Run cmake to build the final entry-point binary.
Firstly, we need to change to the app
directory at the root of the Sonic Pi repository:
cd ~/Development/sonic-pi/app
Next we run the build-all script for Linux:
./linux-build-all.sh
Finally, you can run your newly compiled Sonic Pi
app within the build
directly either by double clicking it in your file manager or via the terminal
./sonic-pi
Good luck and please share your new live coding adventure with us over on:
https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net
Anaconda (a popular data science toolkit) installs a lot of extra programs, which conflicts with the build process mentioned above.
If you run:
conda deactivate
Before the build steps that should stop things breaking. Once Sonic Pi is built, you can use conda
as normal after that.