Boost Download and Installation

The boost libraries are intended for easy download and installation; many libraries require nothing more that downloading and unpacking to be ready for use, including full documentation. When required, see Building Boost Libraries to create object libraries.

Download

Click here to download releases from SourceForge.

The Boost release includes all of the libraries and other material from the web site. It is available in ZIP or TAR.GZ formats. Past releases are also available.

It is also possible to download current snapshots of work-in-progress from Boost's CVS repository.

.zip file

The .zip format is widely supported by both free decoders and commercial compress/archive utilities. If you don't already have a .zip file decoder, download one from the Info-ZIP web site, which supplies versions for many operating systems.

Text file line endings in the .zip file are as supplied by each library developer. This works fine for Windows, but not for Unix/Linux. The .tar.gz file supplies Unix/Linux friendly line endings.

.tar.gz file

The .tar.gz format is widely supported on Unix/Linux platforms. Some Windows compress/archive utilities can read the format as well. Because the gzip format compresses the archive as a single file rather than compressing each file individually, the .tar.gz file is smaller that the .zip file.

Text file line endings in the .tar.gz file have been converted to newlines for ease of use on Unix/Linux platforms.

Boost CVS Repository

All Boost files, including the entire distribution tree including web site HTML is maintained in a CVS repository. Command line, GUI, or browser access is available.

Boost CVS access via command line or graphical clients

For those who have CVS clients installed, the libraries are also available from the public Boost CVS repository. Free command line clients (often already installed on Linux/Unix systems) are available for many systems, and free GUI clients are available for Windows, Mac, and other systems.

See the much improved CVS documentation (Section F) from SourceForge, which includes links to the home pages for various GUI and command line clients.

The general procedure for command-line clients is something like this:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.boost.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/boost login
[Hit <return> when it asks for a password]
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.boost.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/boost checkout boost cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.boost.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/boost logout

Read the manual for your CVS client for further information.

This access is read-only; if you are a library author and wish to have CVS write access, please contact one of the moderators.

Boost CVS access via web Browser

For access to the CVS archive from any modern web browser, you can also use the web browser interface. Try one of the color diffs to see how a file has changed over time.

Installation

Boost does not yet have a standardized installation process. There has been some interest in developing one; as of this writing Bill Kempf has volunteered to coordinate and is gathering volunteers. If you have expertise in this area (particularly cross-platform expertise), and you would like to contribute, please announce your availability on the Boost Install mailing list.

That said, preparing to use Boost in a development project is relatively straightforward. Most boost libraries are implemented entirely within their header files. The only preparation for their use is to add the boost root directory to your compiler's list of #include<...> search paths. For example, using Windows 2000, if you have unzipped release 1.28.0 from boost_all.zip into the top level directory of your C drive, adding '-Ic:/boost_1_28_0' to the command line of most compilers is sufficient.

The Python, Regex, and Threads libraries are implemented in part as separate source files, and thus require compilation before use. See Building Boost Libraries for an automatic tool to prepare such libraries. Some of the individual libraries also include make and/or project files for various compilers, but every library with a built component includes the neccessary Jamfile for building with Boost.Build, our standard build tool.

Revised 15 February, 2003

Written by Jens Maurer 2001-02-11