Installation

Compiling from source

1.9 and earlier versions

If you want to compile Conky yourself, make sure you have gcc, glibc, gettext, autoconf, automake and the libraries for the features you want and run:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --help
# you'll now see a list with features
$ ./configure --enable-feature1 --disable-feature2 ...
$ make

After doing this conky will be available in the src subdirectory, if you want it on a more 'sane' place, run the following as root:

$ make install

1.10 and later versions

Conky 2 will use cmake instead of autotools which means you won't need autoconf and automake anymore but you'll need cmake.

You will need the tolua library (Ref.), which can be installed for Linux with apt-get install libtolua-dev libtolua++5.1-dev. You also need the following development packages if you keep the default cmake configuration: apt-get install libimlib2-dev libncurses5-dev libx11-dev libxdamage-dev libxft-dev libxinerama-dev libxml2-dev.

Then, building conky will work like this:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ccmake ..
# this will launch a curses-based UI where you can configure
# everything, when you are ready you can build as usual:
$ make  # This will compile conky in the `src` subdirectory
$ make install

Instead of running ccmake .. you can also run cmake .. which will just take the default values for everything.

BUILD_FLAGS

Once you have installed conky you can use conky -v to show all the installed build options. Here is a list of all the available options (updated 23/06/2016):

• HAVE_OPENMP
• BUILD_MATH
• BUILD_HDDTEMP
• BUILD_PORT_MONITORS
• BUILD_HTTP
• BUILD_IPV6
• BUILD_IRC
• BUILD_CURL
• BUILD_RSS
• BUILD_ICAL
• BUILD_ICONV
• BUILD_MYSQL
• BUILD_WEATHER_METAR
• BUILD_WEATHER_XOAP
• BUILD_WLAN
• BUILD_IBM
• BUILD_NVIDIA
• BUILD_EVE
• BUILD_BUILTIN_CONFIG
• BUILD_OLD_CONFIG
• BUILD_IMLIB2
• BUILD_MIXER_ALSA
• BUILD_APCUPSD
• BUILD_IOSTATS
• BUILD_NCURSES
• BUILD_I18N
• BUILD_LUA_CAIRO
• BUILD_LUA_IMLIB2
• BUILD_LUA_RSVG
• BUILD_X11
• BUILD_XDAMAGE
• BUILD_XINERAMA
• BUILD_XSHAPE
• BUILD_XDBE
• BUILD_XFT
• BUILD_ARGB
• BUILD_AUDACIOUS
• BUILD_BMPX
• BUILD_CMUS
• BUILD_MPD
• BUILD_MOC
• BUILD_XMMS2

Some options might require certain build flags to be enabled, if you use a package (eg. see below) you must add the flags (and recompile). Alternatively you can contact the maintainer to update the conky package with the flag.

Conky on FreeBSD

Conky is in ports in sysutils/conky. To install it:

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/conky
make install clean

Conky on Linux

Arch

Conky is available in the Arch repositories, so you can install it the normal way:

$ pacman -S conky

In addition, there are many variants of conky AUR.

Fedora

Conky is available in the Fedora repositories, so you can install it the normal way:

$ sudo yum install conky

RHEL/CentOS/Scientific

Conky is available in the EPEL repositories, install the relevant EPEL config if you haven't already:

# chose one of the following
$ sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
$ sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

# install with
$ sudo yum install conky

Gentoo

Conky is available in the Gentoo repositories, so you can install it the normal way:

$ emerge conky
# or, if you use Paludis
$ cave resolve conky -x

Debian and Ubuntu

Conky is available in both the Debian and Ubuntu repositories, so you can install it the normal way:

$ sudo apt-get install conky

Foresight

For Foresight Linux or any other rPath-based distro:

$ sudo conary update conky

NixOS

Same as installing anything else on NixOS:

$ nix-env -i conky

At the time of writing (Fri Apr 15 12:42:19 PDT 2016) it looks like only conky-1.10.1 is available. Once somebody updates it to version 2, if you don't see the update you can try to update your packages on Nix with nix-channel --update.