Getting SCons running

Introduction#

SCons is written in Python 2 and doesn’t need any dependencies to work. You can just copy its scripts to your project source tree and run from here. Or you may want to use version packaged for your operating system.

Installing on Linux

On Debian or Ubuntu, you can install SCons using

$ sudo apt-get install scons

On YUM-based systems, use

$ sudo yum install scons

You can install using an RPM by downloading it, then running

$ sudo rpm -Uvh https://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scons/scons-2.5.0-1.noarch.rpm    

Installing on Windows

Grab installer from https://scons.org/pages/download.html

Or try pip installation tool that comes with Python:

pip install scons

If scons still can’t be found after that, make sure that Python Scripts/ folder is added to PATH for your Python installation.

Running from source

If you have modifications to share or just want to try new version in development.

$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/scons/scons
$ python scons/src/script/scons.py

Installing with Python pip

pip install scons

If you are not to run scons from command line, check that Python scripts directory is added to PATH for your installation.

If you want to play with API, import SCons from Python won’t work, because SCons 2.5.x and below allows to install multiple versions side-by-side. This was needed to switch between different SCons versions during development and troubleshooting. Now the more common way for this is to use virtualenv or just run it from source.