Building the Overviewer from Source

These instructions are for building the C extension for Overviewer. Once you have finished with these instructions, head to Running the Overviewer.

Note

Pre-built Windows and Debian executables are available on the Installing page. These kits already contain the compiled code and require no further setup, so you can skip to the next section of the docs: Running the Overviewer.

Get The Source

First step: download the platform-independent source! Either clone with Git (recommended if you know Git) or download the most recent snapshot

Once you have the source, see below for instructions on building for your system.

Build Instructions For Various Operating Systems

Windows Build Instructions

First, you’ll need a compiler. You can either use Visual Studio, or cygwin/mingw. The free Visual Studio Express is okay. You will want the C++ version (Microsoft® Visual C++® 2010 Express). Note that the Express version of Visual Studio will only build 32-bit executables. We currently don’t have a recommended way of building Overviewer on 64-bit Windows using free tools. If you have bought a copy of Visual Studio, you can use it for 64-bit builds.

Prerequisites

You will need a copy of the PIL sources.

Building with Visual Studio

  1. Get the latest Overviewer source code as per above.

  2. From the Start menu, navigate to the ‘Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express’ and open the ‘Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010)’ shortcut.

  3. cd to the folder containing the Overviewer source code.

  4. Copy Imaging.h and ImPlatform.h from your PIL installation into the current working directory.

  5. First try a build:

    c:\python26\python setup.py build

If you encounter the following errors:

error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat

then try the following:

set DISTUTILS_USE_SDK=1
set MSSdk=1
c:\python26\python setup.py build

If the build was successful, there should be a c_overviewer.pyd file in your current working directory.

Building with mingw-w64 and msys2

This is the recommended way to build on Windows without MSVC.

  1. Install msys2 by following all the instructions on the msys2 installation page.

  2. Install the dependencies:

    pacman -S git mingw-w64-x86_64-python2-numpy mingw-w64-x86_64-python2-Pillow mingw-w64-x86_64-python2 mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain

  3. Clone the Minecraft-Overviewer git repository:

    git clone https://github.com/overviewer/Minecraft-Overviewer.git

    The source code will be downloaded to your msys2 home directory, e.g. C:\msys2\home\Potato\Minecraft-Overviewer

  4. Close the msys2 shell. Instead, open the MinGW64 shell.

  5. Build the Overviewer by changing your current working directory into the source directory and executing the build script:

    cd Minecraft-Overviewer
python2 setup.py build

After it finishes, you should now be able to execute overviewer.py from the MINGW64 shell.

Building with mingw

  1. Open a MinGW shell.

  2. cd to the Overviewer directory.

  3. Copy Imaging.h and ImPlatform.h from your PIL installation into the current working directory.

  4. Build:

    python setup.py build --compiler=mingw32

If the build fails with complaints about -mno-cygwin, open the file Lib/distutils/cygwincompiler.py in an editor of your choice, and remove all mentions of -mno-cygwin. This is a bug in distutils, filed as Issue 12641.

Linux

You will need the gcc compiler and a working build environment. On Ubuntu and Debian, this can be done by installing the build-essential package.

You will need the following packages (at least):

  • python-imaging (for PIL)
  • python-dev
  • python-numpy

Then to build:

python2 setup.py build

At this point, you can run ./overviewer.py from the current directory, so to run it you’ll have to be in this directory and run ./overviewer.py or provide the the full path to overviewer.py. Another option would be to add this directory to your $PATH. Note that there is a python2 setup.py install step that you can run which will install things into /usr/local/bin, but this is strongly not recommended as it might conflict with other installs of Overviewer.

OSX

Note

You will need to have XCode and the XCode Command Line Tools installed (the Command Line Tools can be installed by going to the Downloads tab under the Xcode Preferences dialog).

  1. Download the source code for PIL from http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/

  2. Compile the PIL code (python2 ./setup.py build)

  3. Install PIL (sudo python2 ./setup.py install)

  4. Find the path to the libImaging directory in the PIL source tree.

  5. Build Minecraft Overviewer with the path from step 4 as the value for PIL_INCLUDE_DIR:

    PIL_INCLUDE_DIR="path from step 4" python2 ./setup.py build

The following script (copied into your MCO source directory) should handle everything for you:

#!/bin/bash

# start with a clean place to work
python2 ./setup.py clean

# get PIL
if [ ! -d "`pwd`/Imaging-1.1.7/libImaging" ]; then
    /usr/bin/curl -o imaging.tgz http://effbot.org/media/downloads/Imaging-1.1.7.tar.gz
    tar xzf imaging.tgz
    rm imaging.tgz
fi

# build MCO
PIL_INCLUDE_DIR="`pwd`/Imaging-1.1.7/libImaging" python2 ./setup.py build

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is similar to OSX and Linux, but ensure you’re using Python 2.7. The port of Python 2.6 has bugs with threading under FreeBSD. Everything else you should need is ported, in particular math/py-numpy and graphics/py-imaging.

You may need or want to add the line:

PYTHON_VERSION=2.7

to the file /etc/make.conf, but read the ports documentation to be sure of what this might do to other Python applications on your system.