Libserial

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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.

Developers

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

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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:

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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 ..

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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

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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

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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

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Complete documentation is available here.

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(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!)