more/getting_started/detail/build-from-source-tail.rst

Building the special stage target places Boost library binaries in the stagelib subdirectory of the Boost tree. To use a different directory pass the --stagedir=directory option to b2.

Note

b2 is case-sensitive; it is important that all the parts shown in bold type above be entirely lower-case.

For a description of other options you can pass when invoking b2, type:

b2 --help

In particular, to limit the amount of time spent building, you may be interested in:

• reviewing the list of library names with --show-libraries
• limiting which libraries get built with the --with-library-name or --without-library-name options
• choosing a specific build variant by adding release or debug to the command line.

Note

Boost.Build can produce a great deal of output, which can make it easy to miss problems. If you want to make sure everything is went well, you might redirect the output into a file by appending “>build.log 2>&1” to your command line.

Expected Build Output

During the process of building Boost libraries, you can expect to see some messages printed on the console. These may include

• Notices about Boost library configuration—for example, the Regex library outputs a message about ICU when built without Unicode support, and the Python library may be skipped without error (but with a notice) if you don't have Python installed.

• Messages from the build tool that report the number of targets that were built or skipped. Don't be surprised if those numbers don't make any sense to you; there are many targets per library.

• Build action messages describing what the tool is doing, which look something like:

  toolset-name.c++ long/path/to/file/being/built

• Compiler warnings.

In Case of Build Errors

The only error messages you see when building Boost—if any—should be related to the IOStreams library's support of zip and bzip2 formats as described here. Install the relevant development packages for libz and libbz2 if you need those features. Other errors when building Boost libraries are cause for concern.

If it seems like the build system can't find your compiler and/or linker, consider setting up a user-config.jam file as described here. If that isn't your problem or the user-config.jam file doesn't work for you, please address questions about configuring Boost for your compiler to the Boost.Build mailing list.