mu4e is part of mu — by installing the latter, the former is
installed as well. Some Linux distributions provide packaged versions of
mu/mu4e; if you can use those, there is no need to compile
anything yourself. However, if there are no packages for your
distribution, if they are outdated, or if you want to use the latest
development versions, you can follow the steps below.
The first step is to get some build dependencies. The details depend a bit on your system’s setup / distribution.
$ sudo apt-get install git meson libgmime-3.0-dev libxapian-dev emacs
$ sudo dnf install git meson gmime30-devel xapian-core-devel emacs
The next step is to get the mu sources. There are two alternatives:
git clone https://github.com/djcb/mu.git
What all that in place, let’s build and install mu and mu4e.
Enter the directory where you unpacked or cloned mu. Then:
$ ./configure && make $ sudo make install
Note: if you are familiar with meson, you can of course use its
commands directly; the make commands are just a thin wrapper around
that.
After this, mu and mu4e should be installed 3 on your system, and be available from the
command line and in Emacs.
You may need to restart Emacs, so it can find mu4e in its
load-path. If, even after restarting, Emacs cannot find mu4e,
you may need to add it to your load-path explicitly; check where
mu4e is installed, and add something like the following to your
configuration before trying again:
;; the exact path may differ --- check it (add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/mu4e")
There is some support for using the Emacs customization system in
mu4e, but for now, we recommend setting the values manually. Please
refer to Example configurations for a couple of examples of this; here we
go through things step-by-step.
there’s a
hard dependency between versions of mu4e and mu — you cannot
combine different versions