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

Install Boost.Build

Boost.Build is a text-based system for developing, testing, and installing software. First, you'll need to build and install it. To do this:

1. Go to the directory toolsbuildv2.
2. Run
3. Run b2 install --prefix=PREFIX where PREFIX is the directory where you want Boost.Build to be installed
4. Add PREFIXbin to your PATH environment variable.

Identify Your Toolset

First, find the toolset corresponding to your compiler in the following table (an up-to-date list is always available in the Boost.Build documentation).

Note

If you previously chose a toolset for the purposes of building b2, you should assume it won't work and instead choose newly from the table below.

Toolset Name	Vendor	Notes
acc	Hewlett Packard	Only very recent versions are known to work well with Boost
borland	Borland
como	Comeau Computing	Using this toolset may require configuring another toolset to act as its backend
darwin	Apple Computer	Apple's version of the GCC toolchain with support for Darwin and MacOS X features such as frameworks.
gcc	The Gnu Project	Includes support for Cygwin and MinGW compilers.
hp_cxx	Hewlett Packard	Targeted at the Tru64 operating system.
intel	Intel
msvc	Microsoft
sun	Sun	Only very recent versions are known to work well with Boost.
vacpp	IBM	The VisualAge C++ compiler.

If you have multiple versions of a particular compiler installed, you can append the version number to the toolset name, preceded by a hyphen, e.g. intel-9.0 or borland-5.4.3.

Select a Build Directory

Boost.Build will place all intermediate files it generates while building into the build directory. If your Boost root directory is writable, this step isn't strictly necessary: by default Boost.Build will create a bin.v2/ subdirectory for that purpose in your current working directory.

Invoke b2

Change your current directory to the Boost root directory and invoke b2 as follows:

b2 --build-dir=build-directory_ toolset=toolset-name_ stage

For a complete description of these and other invocation options, please see the Boost.Build documentation.