Thanks for checking out LibSerial! LibSerial provides a convenient, object oriented approach to accessing serial ports on POSIX systems.

After you get to know LibSerial a bit, if you find that you have ideas for improvement, please be sure to let us know!

If you simply want to use LibSerial and you already utilize a Debian Linux distribution, use apt to install the current release package:

sudo apt install libserial-dev

Example code to demonstrate how to use the library can be found in the examples directory. An self-contained example project demonstrating the use of CMake and GNU Autotools (make) can be found in examples/example_project directory.

If you are a developer and would like to make use of the latest code, you will need to have a few packages installed to build LibSerial: a recent g++ release (anything after gcc-3.2 should work), autotools, cmake, doxygen, sphinx, the python sip library, the boost unit test library, pkg-config, and Google Test (gtest). The following commands should install the required packages for Debian/Ubuntu users:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install g++ git autogen autoconf build-essential cmake graphviz \
                 libboost-dev libboost-test-dev libgtest-dev libtool \
                 python-sip-dev doxygen python-sphinx pkg-config

If you get the source code from github and would like to install the library, there are a few steps you will need to accomplish:

If you are using CMake, to build the library you can simply run the compile.sh script:

./compile.sh

To install the library:

cd build
sudo make install

You can specify an installation directory different from the default, (/usr/local/), by replacing the cmake .. command in the compile.sh script. For example, to install under /usr instead of the /usr/local directory, use the following:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..

If you are using GNU Autotools (make):

GNU Autotools is currently configured to built all unit tests, so first you will need to compile the GTest library object files and copy libgtest.a and libgtest_main.a into your /usr/lib/ directory which you can accomplish by running the gtest.sh convenience script:

./gtest.sh

To generate the configure script:

make -f Makefile.dist

To execute the configure script, first create a build directory, then run the script from the build directory as follows:

./configure

You can specify an installation directory different from the default, (/usr/local/), by adding --prefix=/installation/directory/path/ to the configure command. For example, to install into the top level include directory as the package manager would accomplish, you can simply run the following:

./configure --prefix=/usr/

Once you have executed the configure script, you can build the library with make and install with make install:

make
sudo make install

If you are interested in running the unit tests, ensure serial port names are appropriate for your hardware configuration in the test/UnitTests.cpp file:

#define TEST_SERIAL_PORT_1 "/dev/ttyUSB0"
#define TEST_SERIAL_PORT_2 "/dev/ttyUSB1"

The unit tests will be built during the make steps above or by running the cmake compile script:

./compile.sh

Unit test executables built using make can be run from the build directory using the command:

ctest -V .

Alternatively, unit test executables built using CMake can be run from the libserial/build/bin/ directory:

./build/bin/UnitTests
./build/bin/unit_tests

Complete documentation is available here.

(Let us know that this repository was useful to you by clicking the "star" in the upper right corner of the LibSerial Github home page!)