meli-terminal-mail-client/BUILD.md

Build meli

For a quick start, build and install locally:

PREFIX=~/.local make install

Available subcommands for make are listed with make help. The Makefile should be POSIX portable and not require a specific make version.

meli requires rust version 1.70.0 or later and rust's package manager, Cargo. Information on how to get it on your system can be found here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/getting-started/installation.html

With Cargo available, the project can be built with make and the resulting binary will then be found under target/release/meli. Run make install to install the binary and man pages. This requires root, so I suggest you override the default paths and install it in your $HOME: make PREFIX=${HOME}/.local install.

You can build and run meli with one command: cargo run --release.

Build features

Some functionality is held behind "feature gates", or compile-time flags.

Cargo features for meli are documented in its README.md file.

Cargo features for melib are documented in its README.md file.

The following list explains each feature's purpose:

• gpgme enables GPG support via libgpgme (on by default)
• dbus-notifications enables showing notifications using dbus (on by default)
• notmuch provides support for using a notmuch database as a mail backend (on by default)
• jmap provides support for connecting to a jmap server and use it as a mail backend (on by default)
• sqlite3 provides support for builting fast search indexes in local sqlite3 databases (on by default)
• cli-docs includes the manpage documentation compiled by either mandoc or man binary to plain text in meli's command line. Embedded documentation can be viewed with the subcommand meli man [PAGE] (on by default).
• static and *-static bundle C libraries in dependencies so that you don't need them installed in your system (on by default).

Build Debian package (deb)

Building with Debian's packaged cargo might require the installation of these two packages: librust-openssl-sys-dev librust-libdbus-sys-dev

A *.deb package can be built with make deb-dist

Using notmuch

To use the optional notmuch backend feature, you must have libnotmuch5 installed in your system. In Debian-like systems, install the libnotmuch5 packages. meli detects the library's presence on runtime. If it is not detected, you can use the library_file_path setting on your notmuch account to specify the absolute path of the library.

Using GPG

To use the optional gpg feature, you must have libgpgme installed in your system. In Debian-like systems, install the libgpgme11 package. meli detects the library's presence on runtime.

Building and running on Android with termux

This is not a supported or stable setup so caveat emptor.

At the time of writing this, Android is not a stable Rust target. The packaged Rust from termux will be used.

The following steps should suffice to build and run meli on termux:

$ pkg install rust perl make m4 man
$ cargo install meli # ensure .cargo/bin is in your PATH

Exporting EDITOR and PAGER might be useful.

Development

Development builds can be built and/or run with

cargo build
cargo run

There is a debug/tracing log feature that can be enabled by using the flag --feature debug-tracing after uncommenting the features in Cargo.toml. The logs are printed in stderr when the env var MELI_DEBUG_STDERR is defined, thus you can run meli with a redirection (i.e 2> log).

To trace network and protocol communications you can enable the following features:

• imap-trace
• jmap-trace
• nntp-trace
• smtp-trace