Build and Install¶

OpenMeta uses CMake and has no required third-party dependencies for the core read path.

Build¶

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

cmake --install build --prefix /opt/openmeta

Core toggles:

OPENMETA_BUILD_STATIC / OPENMETA_BUILD_SHARED: build static/shared OpenMeta libraries.
OPENMETA_BUILD_TOOLS: build the metaread CLI.
OPENMETA_BUILD_TESTS: build GoogleTest unit tests.
OPENMETA_BUILD_FUZZERS: build libFuzzer targets (Clang).
OPENMETA_BUILD_FUZZTEST: build FuzzTest-based fuzz targets (when available).
OPENMETA_FUZZTEST_FUZZING_MODE: enable FuzzTest fuzzing-mode flags.
OPENMETA_WITH_ZLIB / OPENMETA_WITH_BROTLI: enable payload decompression when the system libraries are available.
OPENMETA_WITH_EXPAT: enable XMP packet parsing when Expat is available.
OPENMETA_USE_LIBCXX: build against libc++ (useful when deps were built with libc++).

Optional dependency notes:

zlib enables Deflate decompression (for example, PNG iCCP and compressed text/XMP chunks).
Brotli enables JPEG XL brob compressed metadata decoding.
Expat enables parsing XMP RDF/XML into structured properties. Without it, OpenMeta still locates XMP blocks but does not decode them into entries.

Docs (optional):

OPENMETA_BUILD_DOCS: generate Doxygen HTML on install.
OPENMETA_BUILD_SPHINX_DOCS: generate a Sphinx site (Doxygen XML + Breathe).
OPENMETA_PYTHON_EXECUTABLE: override the Python interpreter used for Sphinx (useful for uv/venv/conda when CMake would otherwise pick system Python).

Python (optional):

OPENMETA_BUILD_PYTHON: build Python bindings (nanobind).
OPENMETA_BUILD_WHEEL: add an openmeta_wheel build target and copy the wheel on install.
OPENMETA_WHEEL_NO_BUILD_ISOLATION: use pip wheel --no-build-isolation during wheel builds.

If you install dependencies into a custom prefix, provide it via CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH.

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/mnt/f/UBS