General Installation Notes

For ordinary Graphviz builds and installation, the following notes can be ignored. They are only reveleant if you decide to move the software after the initial installation.

The Graphviz software needs to find certain files at runtime, so one cannot just copy the binary and library files. Most importantly, it looks for a file configN. This file is used to determine which layout and rendering features are available. It is assumed to be in the same directory as the plugin libraries.

By default, the path to the directory containing the configN file and the plugins is built in at build time. On Windows and Linux systems, this path is determined dynamically using the file system location of the gvc library (also Mac OS/X since about graphviz-2.29.20110526). These can all be overridden by defining the environment variable GVBINDIR.

For convenience, the Windows binary package also provides some basic configuration files for the fontconfig library. These are stored in the etc directory. If the Graphviz software is moved, this directory should probably also be moved to be in the same directory as the Graphviz bin and lib directories.

Source Code

Notes on how to build Graphviz on Windows. N.B. Except in rare cases, such as a desire to modify the core Graphviz code, there is no need to build Graphviz on Windows from source. We strongly recommend that one should just install one of the available binary packages from here. If you insist, we will answer questions but basically you are on your own.

Executable Packages from AT&T

Solaris
Stable and development pkgs for Solaris systems

Windows
Stable and development Windows Install packages

Mac
Stable and development Mac OS Install packages

and third-party libraries.

Java Support

Download Grappa.

In our experience with Grappa applications, we encountered many problems in trying to get applets to run under the various incompatible versions of Java extant (didn't Sun hire any engineers who believe in backward compatibility?) and we found performance problems when working with graphs of many hundreds or thousands of objects. Our work on Yoix is a new attack to these engineering problems. Yoix itself is a web application language, and is not Graphviz-aware. So, the base system it is not a replacement for Grappa. Instead, we are working on a Graphviz extension module that loads in Yoix. We plan to release this extension to Yoix in late 2005 or 2006.

Third-Party (non-AT&T) Executable Packages

We list these links as a courtesy, but disclaim responsibility for the contents of these software products.

Linux
Debian package
Ubuntu Hardy, Interpid package.
Fedora. On a working Fedora system, use:

                  yum list 'graphviz*' 

Mac OS X
MacPorts provides both stable and development versions of Graphviz and the Mac GUI Graphviz.app. These can be obtained via the ports "graphviz", "graphviz-devel", "graphviz-gui" and "graphviz-gui-devel".
Homebrew has a graphviz port (so just brew install graphviz, we hope).

Pixelglow Graphviz An enhanced GUI application for Mac OS X based on Graphviz 1.13 (out of date, not maintained) An updated version of this is now available using macports, as noted above.

Warning: it can take a long time (hours) to build graphviz from source with a full set of drivers, because of its package dependencies. Specifically, graphviz drivers use cairopango for internationalized text sizing and rendering, ghostscript for loading and rendering external Postscript shapes, a bunch of libraries for X11 support, and possibly gtkglext (which implies gtk2 and mesa) for the experimental smyrna viewer. This may even force building glib2 if not already present.

Windows
Cygwin Ports provides a port of Graphviz to Cygwin.
WinGraphviz Win32/COM object (dot/neato library for Visual Basic and ASP).

Other Unix
FreeBSD
Solaris

Fonts

Spline-o-matic distribution