Rasqal RDF Query Library - Installation

Dave Beckett
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
University of Bristol

1. Getting the sources

1.1 Getting the sources from releases

The sources are available from http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/dist/source/ (master site) and also from the SourceForge site.

1.2 Getting the sources from CVS

Note that using this rather than the bundles may require having some extra development tools. Presently this includes the gperf tool.

  # sh, bash, ...
  CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.ilrt.org:/cvsroot
  export CVSROOT
  # csh, tcsh, ...
  setenv CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@cvs.ilrt.org:/cvsroot

  cvs login
Logging in to :pserver:anonymous@cvs.ilrt.org:2401/cvsroot
CVS password: 
  [return]

  cvs checkout redland/rasqal

  cd redland/rasqal

At this stage, or after a cvs 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.

2. Configuring and building

Rasqal uses the GNU automake and autoconf to handle system dependency checking.

Rasqal is developed and built on x86 GNU/Linux (Redhat 9, Debian unstable) but is also regularly tested on sparc Sun Solaris 2.x, x86 FreeBSD 4.8, ppc Apple OSX 10.2 and as part of Redland on several other systems via the SourceForge compile farm.

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. 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 Raptor is being developed with automake 1.6.3 (minimum version 1.6), autoconf 2.57 (minimum version 2.52) and libtool 1.4.2a (minimum version 1.4). These are only needed when compiling from CVS sources. It is expected that development will move to require automake 1.7, autoconf 2.57 and libtool 1.4.3.

2.2 Options for configure

Raptor also supports the following extra configure options:

None yet

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.

3. Using the library

...

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


Copyright 2003 Dave Beckett, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol