Getting Started¶

Welcome to the Cardano C Library documentation. This section will guide you through the steps necessary to start using the Cardano C Library in your projects.

Building and Installing from Source¶

Prerequisites:

• C99 compiler

• CMake 2.8 or newer

• CMake compatible build system (make, Apple Xcode, MinGW, …)

Configuration Options:

You can configure the build with several options using CMake. The most notable options for the Cardano C Library include adjusting the installation prefix, and enabling unit tests.

Configuration options

A handful of configuration flags can be passed to cmake. The following table lists libcardano-c compile-time directives and several important generic flags.

The following configuration options will also be defined as macros [1] in config.h and can therefore be used in code:

If you want to pass other custom configuration options, please refer to http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_Useful_Variables.

Building using Make:

To build the Cardano C Library as a static library, use the following commands:

cd $(mktemp -d)
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release /path/to/cardano-c
make

Note: Replace /path/to/cardano-c with the actual path to the Cardano C Library source directory.

To install locally:

make install

Root permissions are required on most systems when using the default installation prefix.

Portability

libcardano-c is highly portable and works on both little- and big-endian systems regardless of the operating system. After building on an exotic platform, you might wish to verify the result by running the unit tests.

Linking with libcardano-c¶

If you include and linker paths include the directories to which libcardano-c has been installed, compiling programs that uses libcardano-c requires no extra considerations.

You can verify that everything has been set up properly by creating a file with the following contents

#include <cardano/cardano.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char * argv[])
{
    printf("Hello from libcardano-c %s\n", cardano_get_lib_version());
}

and compiling it

cc hello_cardano.c -lcardano-c -o hello_cardano

libcardano-c also comes with pkg-config support. If you install libcardano-c with a custom prefix, you can use pkg-config to resolve the headers and objects:

cc $(pkg-config --cflags libcardano-c) hello_cardano.c $(pkg-config --libs libcardano-c) -o hello_cardano