4.5 Compiling LilyPond

4.5.1 Using make

LilyPond is compiled with the make command. Assuming make is configured properly, you can simply run:

make

‘make’ is short for ‘make all’. To view a list of make targets, run:

make help

TODO: Describe what make actually does.

See also

Generating documentation provides more info on the make targets used to build the LilyPond documentation.

4.5.2 Saving time with the ‘-j’ option

If your system has multiple CPUs, you can speed up compilation by adding ‘-jX’ to the make command, where ‘X’ is one more than the number of cores you have. For example, a typical Core2Duo machine would use:

make -j3

If you get errors using the ‘-j’ option, and ‘make’ succeeds without it, try lowering the X value.

Because multiple jobs run in parallel when ‘-j’ is used, it can be difficult to determine the source of an error when one occurs. In that case, running ‘make’ without the ‘-j’ is advised.

4.5.3 Useful make variables

make normally echoes each command, but LilyPond makefiles suppress this behavior by default. The goal is to show progress without hiding warnings and errors in the noise of long commands.

To enable echoing commands, and to increase the verbosity of some of the commands, set VERBOSE=1 on the command line or in ‘local.make’ at the top of the build tree.

Similarly, to reduce the verbosity, set SILENT=1. Because of the way these options are implemented, make -s does not serve this purpose.

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