Installation

Installing prebuilt binaries

Arch Linux

pacman -S conky

There's also different flavors on AUR you can use if you want non-default functionality. We suggest you install them as described on Arch Wiki, but you can also use an AUR helper like paru to automate the process.

Fedora

sudo dnf install conky

FreeBSD

# Conky is in ports in `sysutils/conky`.
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/conky
make install clean

# Alternatively, install the binary package.
pkg install conky

Gentoo Linux

emerge conky

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install conky

NixOS

nix-env -i conky

Compiling from source

Conky makes use CMake, ensure it's installed on your system.

You'll need the following development packages if you keep the default CMake configuration:

apt-get install cmake libimlib2-dev libncurses5-dev libx11-dev libxdamage-dev libxft-dev libxinerama-dev libxml2-dev libxext-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev liblua5.3-dev gperf

NOTES:

Used version of CMake must support C++17, which means it must be >=3.8.
Specific libcurl4-*-dev package that will be required will depend on what flavor of libcurl you have installed (openssl is the default).

Generating make files

However you choose to configure conky build flags, you'll be able to see their description by hovering in GUI or while they're selected in ncurses TUI. You may also want to list all options with descriptions in advance and you can do so using cmake -LH -S . -B build.

You can use GUI to configure different build options:

cmake-gui -S . -B build --fresh

Or alternatively, you can use an ncurses based TUI:

ccmake -S . -B build --fresh

If you wish you can also generate make files with default options:

cmake -S . -B build --fresh

Building the project

To build conky in build/src subdirectory, run:

cmake --build build

If you did the build for debugging purposes, you can now run conky with ./build/src/conky without installing it. Otherwise, see the following section.

To install conky on your system, run:

cmake --install build

Version <1.9

Outdated

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 make install as root.

MacOS Build

You'll need to first Install Xcode & Xcode command-line tools:

To install Xcode command-line tools run

xcode-select --install

Additionally, you will need to install some libraries depending on the features you enable. This can be done using Homebrew as follows:

brew install --force \
  cmake              \
  curl               \
  freetype           \
  gettext            \
  gperf              \
  imlib2             \
  lcov               \
  librsvg            \
  libxfixes          \
  libxft             \
  libxi              \
  libxinerama        \
  libxml2            \
  lua                \
  ninja              \
  pkg-config

You might need to install XQuartz to get conky working.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G Ninja ..
cmake --build .

Refer to the macOS GitHub Action for an example.