Installing/uninstalling local graphviz with application

1

Hello,

I am interested in shipping graphviz as part of an Electron app installation targeting Windows, MacOS and Linux. The requirements are:

  • Install/uninstall independently of any other graphviz installations.
  • Run programmatically from the Electron app.

I was hoping to simply put all executables and libraries in a single folder (different for each OS) but I’m not having success. Running ./dot results in this message:

-rwxrwx--- 1 xyz xyz 33968 Oct  1 03:33 dot
xyz@graphviz:~/graphviz$ ./dot
./dot: error while loading shared libraries: libgvc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
xyz@graphviz:~/graphviz$ 
borglet9@graphviz:~/graphviz$ ls -al libgvc*
-rwxrwx--- 1 xyz xyz    1091 Oct  1 03:33 libgvc.la
-rwxrwx--- 1 xyz xyz     250 Oct  1 03:33 libgvc.pc
lrwxrwxrwx 1 xyz xyz      15 Oct  3 08:14 libgvc.so -> libgvc.so.6.0.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 xyz xyz      15 Oct  3 08:14 libgvc.so.6 -> libgvc.so.6.0.0
-rwxrwx--- 1 xyz xyz 2914736 Oct  1 03:33 libgvc.so.6.0.0

I am not a linux expert so not sure why dot can’t find a library that is in the same directory.

Please LMK if this just isn’t possible or what I need to do to make this work.

Thanks!

2

On Linux, the way to do this is with the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. macOS is the same, but uses DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH instead.

Alternatively (and maybe cleaner), you can build a statically linked version of dot and then no shared libraries need to be looked up at runtime.

3

Awesome - thanks!

4

If its an Electron app, you might find it easier to simply use a JavaScript/Wasm version?

This is the one I maintain: @hpcc-js/wasm - npm (npmjs.com)

1 Like
5

This is looking very promising! Thank you!

6

Thanks very much for putting that out there. It is working beautifully and will make cross platform distribution so much easier.

Best,

Mark

1 Like