Table of Contents | Developer information |
Prev |  | Next

# Developer information

The latest source code of OVITO is available in our repository on GitLab.com. Note that the following build instructions pertain to the code of OVITO Basic, which is available under the GNU GPLv3 and MIT open source licenses and includes only subset of program features.

- Building OVITO on Linux
- Building OVITO on Windows
- Building OVITO on macOS

## Requirements

The prerequisites for building OVITO from source are:

Tool/Package | Requirement | Notes
--- | --- | ---
C++ compiler | required | Compiler must support C++14 language standard (e.g. GNU g++ 4.8 or newer)
CMake | required | The build system used by OVITO (CMake 3.2 or newer required)
Git | required | The distributed version control system needed to retrieve the source code
xsltproc | optional | The XSLT processor for generating the user manual
DocBook | optional | The XSL stylesheets required to generate the user manual in HTML format

The library dependencies are:

Library | Requirement | Notes
--- | --- | ---
Qt5 | required | Used for OVITO's graphical user interface (version 5.12 or newer)
zlib | optional | Required for reading and writing compressed files.
Boost | required | OVITO uses some utility classes from this C++ library.
libssh | optional | Used by OVITO's built-in SSH client for remote data access.
ffmpeg | optional | Audio and video processing libraries used by OVITO to write movie files.
libnetcdf | optional | Required by the Amber/NetCDF file reader/writer plugin

The sources of the following third-party libraries are included in the OVITO source distribution and get compiled automatically as part of the build process:

Library | Notes
--- | ---
muparser | A math expression parser library.
Qwt | For plotting and data visualization.
Voro++ | Voronoi cell construction routine required by the Voronoi analysis modifier.
KISS FFT | Required by the Spatial correlation function plugin.

Prev |  | Next
Particle settings | Table of Contents | Building OVITO Basic on Linux