Rig can either be built against SDL for portability or for Android (Although beware that the Android support is incomplete at this point)

1. SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer):

   Rig uses SDL as a portable way to create an OpenGL context and provide input support. SDL should be available on most Linux distributions and most operating systems.

   SDL isn't required if building for Android where Rig uses EGL to create an OpenGL context and directly supports Android's input API.

2. Cogl:

   Rig uses the Cogl 3D graphics utility api to manage OpenGL state and provide math utilities such as matrix, quaternion and vector apis.

   Rig currently depends on the latest Cogl 1.99 development API which means fetching git master from here:

   git clone git://git.gnome.org/cogl

3. Pango:

   The Rig editor relies on Pango for complex text layouting and rendering via the cogl-pango api.

Rig is a standard autotooled project, so once you have fetched the above dependencies then building Rig is just a matter of running:

    ./configure
    make
    make install

Note: Rig can't be run uninstalled currently since the editor won't find its assets. Once you have installed the assets though then it's possible to run incremental rebuilds of Rig in place without re-installing.

For deploying completed applications Rig's editing capabilities can optionally be disabled at build time leaving only the minimal runtime. This is done by passing the --disable-editor argument to the ./configure script.

Rig can be run in two modes:

1. Editor Mode

   This mode is for interactively designing a new user interface. This mode is used by default if the only argument you give to Rig is a path to a UI.xml file like:

    rig /path/to/my/ui.xml
   

   If the XML file doesn't exist then it will be created when you save by pressing Ctrl-S so long as the parent directory already exists.

   Note: When Rig is run in editor mode it will automatically search for image assets under the parent directory of your ui.xml file. (So under /path/to/my for the above example) Because of this, it would not be recommended to create a new ui.xml at the top of your home directory.

2. Device Mode

   Once you have a UI that you want to run as an application Rig can instead be run in a chromeless device mode like this:

    rig --device-mode /path/to/my/ui.xml
   

   Or simply:

    rig -d /path/to/my/ui.xml