Getting xlnt

Binaries

Homebrew

Arch

vcpkg

Compiling xlnt 1.x.x from Source on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus)

Time required: Approximately 5 minutes (depending on your internet speed)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install cmake
sudo apt-get install zlibc

The following steps update the compiler and set the appropriate environment variables - see note [1] below for the reason why we need to update the standard available compiler

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install gcc-6 g++-6
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-6  
export CXX=/usr/bin/g++-6

The following steps will intall xlnt Download the zip file from the xlnt repository https://github.com/tfussell/xlnt/archive/master.zip

cd ~
unzip Downloads/xlnt-master.zip
cd xlnt-master
cmake .
make -j 2
sudo make install

The following step will map the shared library names to the location of the corresponding shared library files

sudo ldconfig

xlnt will now be ready to use on your Ubuntu instance.

[1] Xlnt requires a minimum of gcc 6.2.0 The most recent gcc version available using the standard APT repositories is gcc 5.4.0 (obtained through build-essential 12.1ubuntu2). If these older versions of gcc are used an error "workbook.cpp error 1502:31 'extended_property' is not a class, namespace or enumeration" will occur during the xlnt make command.

Compiling from Source

Build configurations for Visual Studio, GNU Make, Ninja, and Xcode can be created using cmake v3.2+. A full list of cmake generators can be found here. A basic build would look like (starting in the root xlnt directory):

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j8

The resulting shared (e.g. libxlnt.dylib) library would be found in the build/lib directory. Other cmake configuration options for xlnt can be found using "cmake -LH". These options include building a static library instead of shared and whether to build sample executables or not. An example of building a static library with an Xcode project:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -D STATIC=ON -G Xcode ..
cmake --build .
cd bin && ./xlnt.test

Note for Windows: cmake defaults to building a 32-bit library project. To build a 64-bit library, use the Win64 generator

cmake -G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" ..