Building the module¶
Binary releases¶
If you’re on Windows, you can download the current binary release and ignore most of this section.
Official releases are at
https://github.com/bastienleonard/pysfml2-cython/downloads. The
installer contains the module itself, and the required DLLs (SFML and
dependencies). The DLLs are dropped in Python’s folder,
e.g. C:\Python27
. If you haven’t already, make sure that this
folder has been added to the PATH
environment variable.
Christoph Gohlke also provides installers which are currently more up-to-date, with support for Python 2.6 as well as native 64 bits installers on his website: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pysfml
You should be able to use pySFML 2 without installing anything else. Feedback is welcome.
On other platforms, there may still be easier ways to build the module. Someone has written AUR scripts for Arch Linux users:
Getting SFML 2¶
The first thing you should do is get SFML 2 and make sure it works. Please refer to the official tutorial: http://sfml-dev.org/tutorials/2.0/compile-with-cmake.php
Some platforms may make it easier to install it, for example Arch Linux users can get it from the AUR.
If you are on Windows, you will probably want to copy SFML’s headers and libraries directories to the corresponding directories of your compiler/IDE, and SFML’s DLLs to Windows’ DLL directory.
Building on Windows¶
If you don’t have a C++ compiler installed, I suggest using MinGW.
If you are using a recent version of MinGW, you may encounter this error when building the module:
error: unrecognized command line option '-mno-cygwin'
The problem is that the
-mno-cygwin
has been dropped in recent MinGW releases. A quick
way to fix this is to remove the option from the distutils
source. Find the distutils/cygwinccompiler.py
in your Python
installation (it should be something like
C:\Python27\Lib\distutils\cygwinccompiler.py
). Find the
MinGW32CCompiler
class and remove the -mno-cygwin
options:
# class CygwinCCompiler
self.set_executables(compiler='gcc -mno-cygwin -O -Wall',
compiler_so='gcc -mno-cygwin -mdll -O -Wall',
compiler_cxx='g++ -mno-cygwin -O -Wall',
linker_exe='gcc -mno-cygwin',
linker_so='%s -mno-cygwin %s %s'
% (self.linker_dll, shared_option,
entry_point))
If you are using Visual C++, please use the 2008 version. Python was built with this version, and it’s apparently difficult to use 2010 because it links to another C or C++ runtime.
Common build options¶
You can build the module with the setup.py
script (or
setup3k.py
for Python 3). This section discusses some common
options that you may need or find useful.
--inplace
means that the module will be dropped in the current
directory. I find this more practical, as it makes it easier to test
the module once built.
--compiler=mingw32
obviously means that MinGW will be invoked
instead of the default compiler. This is needed when you want to use
GCC on Windows. This command will show you the list of compilers you
can specify: python setup.py build_ext --help-compiler
. Visual
Studio is the default compiler and should work without using this
option.
In the end, the command will look something like this:
python setup.py build_ext --inplace --compiler=mingw32
Building without Cython¶
If you download a source release at the download page, you don’t need to install Cython, since the release already contains the files that Cython would generate.
Make sure that USE_CYTHON
is set to False
in setup.py (or
setup3k.py, if you’re building for Python 3). You can then build the
module by typing this command:
python setup.py build_ext
Building with Cython installed¶
Warning
Currently, modules built straight from the repo probably won’t work (this may depend on your Cython version). Consider using a source release, or follow the indications from this forum post if you still want to build from Git: http://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=5311.msg52943#msg52943
Warning
Several Ubuntu users reported that they can’t build the module
because the Cython package is currently outdated. One solution is
to install Cython manually, for example
with easy_install cython
.
If you downloaded the source straight from the Git repo or if you have
modified the source, you’ll need to install Cython to build a module
including the changes. Also, make sure that USE_CYTHON
is set to
True
in setup.py.
When you’ve done so, you can build the module by typing this command:
python setup.py build_ext
If you get an error related with DL_IMPORT
, refer to the end of
the Building a Python 3 module section.
Building a Python 3 module¶
It’s possible to build a Python 3 module, but you may encounter a few minor problems.
First of all, on my machine, the Cython class used in setup3k.py
to
automate Cython invocation is only installed for Python 2. It’s
probably possible to install it for Python 3, but it’s not complicated
to invoke Cython manually:
cython --cplus sfml.pyx
The next step is to invoke the setup3k.py
script to build the
module. Since we called Cython already, make sure that USE_CYTHON
is set to False
in setup3k.py
, then invoke this command:
python3 setup3k.py build_ext
(Note that you may have to type python
instead of python3
;
typically, GNU/Linux systems provide this as a way to call a specific
version of the interpreter, but I’m not sure that’s the case for all
of them as well as Windows.)
(Also note that on GNU/Linux, the generated file won’t be called
sfml.so
but something like sfml.cpython-32mu.so
. Apparently,
on Windows it’s still sfml.pyd
.)
The second problem used to be that you had to use bytes instead of
Unicode e.g. when passing a filename or window title to SFML. This is
now gone, except possibly in methods that I forgot to fix; make sure
to report the issue if you encounter such a case. When you pass a
Unicode object to these methods, they now encode it in UTF-8 before
passing them to SFML. You can change the encoding by setting the
default_encoding
variable at any time.
Finally, compilation may fail because the src/sfml.h
file
generated by Cython uses the deprecated DL_IMPORT()
macro. At the
root of the project, there is a patch.py
script that will remove
the offending macros for you. The trick is that src/sfml.h
will
not exist at first; the setup script will create it, then try to
compile it and fail. That’s when you need to use patch.py
, and
build the module again.