Manual Compilation

This guide is only tried and tested on GNU/ Linux, but should (hopefully) work on the other platforms. It is adjusted to some of the heuristics that context standalone uses. Words in brackets (i.e. {word}) have to be substituted by your username or similar unique identifier. Note that this is NOT a system wide install, but if you are reading this guide you probably know how to generalize this.

Preparations

1. Create install directory (recommended name: tex): mkdir /home/{user}/tex
2. Create the directory that houses the binaries: mkdir -p /home/{user}/tex/texmf-linux-64/bin
3. Add /home/{user}/tex/texmf-linux-x64/bin to your PATH. This depends on the specific shell you are using, for bash use the .bashrc. Make sure the open a new shell (or logout and login again) for the change to take effect.

Fetch the files

1. Clone the context archive from github into the texmf-context folder i.e. git clone git@github.com:contextgarden/context.git /home/{user}/tex/texmf-context
2. Clone the font files into the fonts folder from github git clone git@github.com:contextgarden/context-distribution-fonts.git /home/{user}/tex/texmf/
3. In order for the configuration to work: cp /home/{user}/tex/texmf-context/web2c/contextcnf.lua /home/{user}/tex/texmf-context/web2c/texmfcnf.lua. Check out /home/{user}/tex/texmf-context/web2c/readme.txt to see why this is neccesary.

Compile

Execute build.sh --native in texmf-context/source/luametatex. The luametatex binary will appear in the build/native/ folder. You may need to chmod +x ./build.sh to make the build script executable.

Install the Binary

1. Copy the luametatex binary to /home/{user}/tex/texmf-linux-64/bin
2. Symlink context and mtxrun to this binary:
   • ln -s /home/{user}/tex/texmf-linux-64/bin/luametatex /home/{user}/tex/texmf-linux-64/bin/mtxrun and
   • ln -s /home/{user}/tex/texmf-linux-64/bin/luametatex /home/{user}/tex/texmf-linux-64/bin/context.
3. Copy the context.lua and mtxrun.lua files from /home/{user}/tex/texmf-context/scripts/context/lua/ into the /home/{user}/tex/texmf-linux-x64/bin directory. Make sure they are executable (i.e. chmod +x /home/{user}/tex/texmf-linux-x64/bin/mtxrun.lua)

Finish the install

Run mtxrun --generate. After that try to compile a test document to make sure it works.

Updates

For newer ConTeXt versions go through the above steps. Take care to empty the build directory before compiling anything to remove/ empty the old build directory:rm /home/{user}/tex/texmf-context/source/luametatex/build -R. Otherwise you might get weird bugs when running context.