Build instructions

Crosswords and Crossword Editor build on most modern Linux distributions and MacOS (build hints). It was developed primarily on Fedora and OpenSuse and should build easily on those platforms with few add-ons. It has dependencies on GTK 4.8 and libadwaita-1.2, which will be built submodules if not installed.

The easiest way to build and test Crosswords from source is by building a flatpak. This command will build and install it:

$ flatpak-builder  --force-clean _flatpak/ org.gnome.Crosswords.Devel.json  --user --install
$ # To run the output:
$ flatpak run org.gnome.Crosswords.Devel

Local build from a container image

An easy way to set up a development environment is to use podman to download and run a container image. This image already contains all the dependencies for Crosswords, so you don’t have to mess around with your system packages.

Install podman and distrobox or toolbox on your distro, and then:

cd crosswords   # wherever you did your "git clone"
sh ci/pull-container-image.sh

In the Crosswords source tree, ci/pull-container-image.sh is a script that will invoke podman pull to download the container image that you can use for development. It is the same image that Crosswords uses for its continuous integration pipeline (CI), so you can have exactly the same setup on your own machine.

Then, the pull-container-image.sh script will give you instructions on how to use distrobox or toolbox to build and install Crosswords inside the container:

You can now run either of these, depending on your preference
for distrobox or toolbox:

  distrobox create --image $image_name --name crosswords
  distrobox enter crosswords

  toolbox create --image $image_name --name crosswords
  toolbox enter crosswords

Once inside the container, you can build and install with this:

  sudo sh ci/build-and-install.sh

You can just run crosswords on the shell afterwards.  It is installed to
the overlay /usr filesystem, and will not intefere with your system:

  crosswords

Now you can build Crosswords while inside the container, and install it. With the instructions above, the Crosswords program will get installed to the container’s overlay file system for /usr without affecting your main system.

Local build

Use standard meson tools to build it locally on Linux:

$ meson setup _build -Dlocaledir=/usr/share/locale
$ ninja -C _build

Note: We set localedir just so that we can find translations of language names. It’s not necessary, but there will be a runtime warning about missing translations without it.

Note: The meson in Ubuntu 21.10 isn’t recent enough to build this app. You can install a local version of meson that’s sufficiently new by running pip3 install --user meson.

Load .puz files (Optional)

In order to use the convertor to load other crossword types, you need to install some python dependencies. The easiest way to do this is to use pip:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Running Crosswords without installation

Running it locally out of the builddir is a little more involved as it requires some environment variables set to work. To make this simple and avoid a full system installation, a run script is included.

Use it as follows:

$ cd _build/

$ # To run the game
$ ./run ./src/crosswords

$ # To run the crossword editor
$ ./run ./src/crossword-editor

$ # To use the convertor
$ ./run ./tools/ipuz-convertor -i puzzle.puz -o /path/to/puzzle.ipuz

$ # To debug the game
$ ./run gdb ./src/crosswords

Loading Puzzle Sets

If you want to test the game with another puzzle-set without installation, you can use the PUZZLE_SET_PATH and PATH environment variables. As an example:

$ PATH=~/Projects/puzzle-sets-xword-dl/ PUZZLE_SET_PATH=~/Projects/puzzle-sets-xword-dl/_build/puzzle-sets/ ./run src/crossword

Common problems

gschemas.compiled

Meson doesn’t rebuild the compiled gschemas file when the source gschema file changes. If you see an error that looks similar to this after a rebuild:

$ ./run src/crosswords
(crosswords:100131): GLib-GIO-ERROR **: 09:46:51.527: Settings schema 'org.gnome.Crosswords' does not contain a key named 'hidden-puzzle-sets'
Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped)

You’ll have to recreate the compiled file. Assuming you’re still in _build, this should fix it:

$ rm data/gschemas.compiled
$ ninja -C .