Rasqal RDF Query Library - Building and Installing from Source

0. Prerequisites

Rasqal requires the Raptor RDF parser toolkit version 1.4.9 or later for parsing RDF, retrieving WWW content and other utility classes and libraries. It can also use Redland as an alternate triple store and enabled by --with-triples-source=redland as described below however Raptor is also required.

1. Getting the sources

1.1 Getting the sources from releases

The sources are available from http://download.librdf.org/source/ (master site) and also from the SourceForge site.

1.2 Getting the sources from Subversion

Building from development sources rather than from a release may required some extra development tools. Presently this includes the flex scanner generator version 2.5.31 or later.

NOTE: Rasqal switched to use Subversion for version control after the 0.9.11 release. If you were using CVS, you will need to re-check out the sources.

  svn checkout http://svn.librdf.org/repository/rasqal/trunk/
  mv trunk rasqal
  cd rasqal

At this stage, or after a svn update you will need to create the automake and autoconf derived files, as described below in Create the configure program by using the autogen.sh script.

Building Rasqal in this way requires some particular development tools not needed when building from snapshot releases - automake and autoconf. The autogen.sh script looks for the newest versions of the auto* tools and checks that they meet the minimum versions.

2. Configuring and building

Requirements: the Raptor RDF parser toolkit version 1.4.9 or later (plus flex and bison as specified above, when building from Subversion). Recommended: PCRE regex library or another implementing the POSIX regex API. If neither is present some of the tests will fail and the query engine will fail to handle regex matches.

Rasqal is developed and built on x86 GNU/Linux (Redhat Fedora Core 4, Debian unstable) but is also regularly tested on sparc Sun Solaris, x86 FreeBSD, ppc Apple OSX and as part of Redland on several other systems via the SourceForge compile farm (typically Alpha Linux, AMD IA64 Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solarix x86).

2.1. Create `configure` program

If there is no configure program, you can create it using the autogen.sh script, as long as you have the automake and autoconf tools. This is done by:

  ./autogen.sh

and you can also pass along arguments intended for configure (see below for what these are):

  ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local/somewhere

Alternatively you can run them by hand with:

  aclocal; autoheader; automake --add-missing; autoconf

The automake and autoconf tools have many different versions and at present development is being done with automake 1.8.3 (minimum version 1.7), autoconf 2.59 (minimum version 2.54) and libtool 1.5.4 (minimum version 1.4). These are only needed when compiling from Subversion sources. autogen.sh enforces the requirements. In future development will move to require automake 1.8, autoconf 2.58 and libtool 1.5.

Rasqal also requires flex version 2.5.31 or newer (2.5.4 will not work) and GNU Bison to build lexers and parsers. These are only required when building from Subversion.

2.2 Options for `configure`

Rasqal also supports the following extra configure options:

--enable-query-languages=LANGUAGES: Pick the RDF query languages to build from the list:
rdql sparqal
The default when this option is omitted is to enable all query languages.
--with-memory-signing: Enable signing of memory allocations so that when memory is allocated with malloc() and released free(), a check is made that the memory was allocated in the same library.
--with-regex-library=NAME: Pick a regex library to use - either pcre (default) for the PCRE or posix a POSIX regex implementation in the C library
--with-triples-source=NAME: Pick a triples source library to use - either raptor (default, and always available) or redland to use Redland. Raptor creates a simple in-store list of triples on parsing each time whereas Redland makes a much more efficient indexed in-memory store. See also --with-redland-config.
--with-pcre-config=NAME: Set the path to the PCRE pcre-config program
--with-raptor= system or internal: This option tells Rasqal to use either the system installed version of raptor or a version in the sibling directory of ../raptor If the option is omittted, Rasqal will guess and choose either the system one, if new enough or the internal one if present. If --with-raptor=system is used and Rasqal discovers that the system raptor is too old, a warning will be given but the configuration will continue.
--with-redland-config=NAME: Set the path to the Redland redland-config program

2.3 Configuring

If everything is in the default place, do:

   ./configure

The most common configuration you will be doing something like this:

   ./configure --prefix=/usr

2.4 Compiling

Compile the library with;

   make

Note: GNU make is probably required so it may be gmake or gnumake on your system

2.5 Testing

You can build and run the built-in test suite with:

  make check

which should emit lots of exciting test messages to the screen but conclude with something like:
All n tests passed
if everything works correctly. There might be some regex tests that fail if no POSIX regex library was available when raptor was compiled

3. Using the library

The public Rasqal API is described in the librasqal.3 UNIX manual/web page