Include dependencies in Ladybird build

[techguy16]

Is there a way to include the dependencies installed by VCPKG when building Ladybird? I would like to know because when I move a build from one system to another, it doesn't work due to missing libraries, which existed on the build machine as they were created during the build process.

[circl-lastname]

Can you send the error you're facing?

[techguy16]

I'll get you the full error soon, but it's related to libskia. Tried installing all packages relating to skia (sudo apt install "*skia*"), but that didn't work.

[circl-lastname]

Skia can only be built from source as a dependency, it may be that for whatever reason Meta/ladybird.sh is not running vcpkg correctly or encounters an error

[techguy16]

How do I build all the *.so files?

[circl-lastname]

Are you using Meta/ladybird.sh?

[techguy16]

Yes, I have been.

[InvalidUsernameException]

It is pretty much impossible to build a fully self-contained application without any system dependencies on Linux, which is one of the reasons why there is no such thing as a portable Linux binary in the general case. Each distro builds separate binaries of every library and application for each of their currently supported versions for a reason.

Unless you take special care to ensure compatibility, you shouldn't expect to be able to build any software (Ladybird or otherwise) on one Linux system and then transfer it to another. Which versions of which distributions are you using on the build and the target system?

[techguy16]

I have been using Ubuntu 22.04 as the build/ environment and Pop!_OS 22.04 as the target.

Is it possible to create an AppImage of Ladybird?

[InvalidUsernameException]

Those are at least closely related. Given that Pop!_OS can use Ubuntu package repos (assuming that Wikipedia is correct on that), it should be possible to get that combination working.

Looks like someone tried to make an AppImage and failed, so that would be a "not without significant effort" I guess.

The actual error would still be useful. Also which folder exactly are you copying?

[ADKaster]

Given your use case of "move the build from one system to another", I think some X/Y problem questions are in order.

• Why do you want to build on one machine and run on another?
• Why is building on the other machine not an option?

One possible "solution" would be to copy only the Build/caches/vcpkg-binary-cache folder from one system to another, and run a build on the second system using ladybird.sh run. That would allow you to cache as much of the built vcpkg dependencies as possible between systems, while still properly linking against the system dependencies of the new platform.

However, if what you really want is a 'distribution' build of the application, such a thing does not exist and will not exist until we get closer to the mid-2026 alpha release. The plan ™️ is to create a flatpak, rather than an AppImage.

If you want a way to have two separate machines you work on with a similar development experience, using the devcontainer in the repo might be your answer. The "optimized" version of the devcontainer will download a development environment from ghcr.io that includes a pre-populated vcpkg binary cache (for release, anyway).

[techguy16]

For your questions, the machine I want to run it on is very slow and would take 6+ hours. After about an hour, the dependencies haven't been compiled yet.

I solved the skia issue, but the error now is:

./Ladybird: error while loading shared libraries: libwebpdecoder.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I will try copying the vcpkg-binary-cache folder and see if that speeds it up.