Installing Graphviz Dot Without Root Access

I want to install Graphviz on a machine in order to get access to the dot diagram generator. However, I don’t have root access on this box, so I want to install it in my home directory, under ~/bin/graphviz. To do this, call the configure script with a few arguments to change the installation directory:

./configure --exec_prefix=$HOME/bin/graphviz/ --mandir=$HOME/man \
--prefix=$HOME/bin/graphviz/

Then make, and install:

make
make install

Even though make install gives me an error, “/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lperl“, I find that Graphviz now appears under ~/bin/graphviz:

ls ~/bin/graphviz/
bin/  include/  lib/  share/

On a different box, I was unable to get this far. I received this error:

libtool: install: error: cannot install `libgraph.la' to a directory not ending in /usr/local/lib

This is caused by an out-of-date libtool.

libtool --version
ltmain.sh (GNU libtool) 1.4 (1.920 2001/04/24 23:26:18)

About Jeff Fitzsimons

Jeff Fitzsimons is a software engineer in the California Bay Area. Technical specialties include C++, Win32, and multithreading. Personal interests include rock climbing, cycling, motorcycles, and photography.
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4 Responses to Installing Graphviz Dot Without Root Access

  1. James says:

    The libtool error took me a while to figure out (and googling sadly doesn’t help).

    If you can’t upgrade libtool, you’re kind of stuck

    For future googlers:

    make clean # Vital to remove the old makefiles.
    ./configure –prefix=$HOME/local # It seems important to avoid ending the path with a /!

  2. Joonas says:

    Thanks mate! I got the same error when configuring with just “./configure –prefix=$HOME” and using libtool 1.5.22 (Dec 2005). I can’t say I understand why, but it worked fine with your configure options. Or perhaps the reason was that I didn’t clean up the previous configuration properly the first time I tried…

  3. kwevej says:

    There is a solution even if your libtool is old:

    Download libtool sources & compile it.
    prepend libtool to the PATH
    ( export PATH=/home/blabla/libtool-2.4/:$PATH )
    don’t forget the make clean before compiling again

  4. minglei says:

    Hi jeff

    like you, run
    ./configure –prefix=$HOME/local

    when I run the make command in the directory, an error following occur.
    ui_settings.h:32: error: expected constructor, destructor, or type conversion before ‘class’”.
    there is a same error like me in this site http://www.graphviz.org/category/tags/compile-error, but no one gives the solution!

    Could you give some suggestion?

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