Installing ODB on Debian and alike

This README describes installing the ODB compiler (odb), runtime libraries (libodb, libodb-<database>), and profile libraries (libodb-boost, libodb-qt) from binary packages on Debian and alike (Ubuntu, etc).

The libodb-sqlite, libodb-pgsql, and libodb-mysql packages depend on the underlying database client library packages which come from the distribution's official package repository. Note that in some versions of Debian and Ubuntu the MySQL client library may be provided by MariaDB.

Note also that the libodb-boost and libodb-qt packages have no dependency on Boost/Qt. Instead, if you wish to use the corresponding profile, you are expected to install the desired packages/versions explicitly.

The following ODB binary packages are provided for Debian and alike (here <...> denotes the version, distribution, and architecture information, for example 2.5.0-1~debian12_amd64 or 2.5.0-1~ubuntu24.04_amd64):

odb_<...>.deb                -- ODB compiler

libodb_<...>.deb             -- Common runtime files
libodb-dev_<...>.deb         -- Common runtime development files

libodb-sqlite_<...>.deb      -- SQLite runtime files
libodb-sqlite-dev_<...>.deb  -- SQLite runtime development files

libodb-pgsql_<...>.deb       -- PostgreSQL runtime files
libodb-pgsql-dev_<...>.deb   -- PostgreSQL runtime development files

libodb-mysql_<...>.deb       -- MySQL runtime files
libodb-mysql-dev_<...>.deb   -- MySQL runtime development files

libodb-boost_<...>.deb       -- Boost profile files
libodb-boost-dev_<...>.deb   -- Boost profile development files

libodb-qt_<...>.deb          -- Qt profile files
libodb-qt-dev_<...>.deb      -- Qt profile development files

Additionally, the following optional packages provide debug information for the above packages:

odb-dbgsym_<...>.deb            -- ODB compiler debug info
libodb-dbgsym_<...>.deb         -- Common runtime debug info
libodb-sqlite-dbgsym_<...>.deb  -- SQLite runtime debug info
libodb-pgsql-dbgsym_<...>.deb   -- PostgreSQL runtime debug info
libodb-mysql-dbgsym_<...>.deb   -- MySQL runtime debug info
libodb-boost-dbgsym_<...>.deb   -- Boost profile debug info
libodb-qt-dbgsym_<...>.deb      -- Qt profile debug info

Typically, when installing ODB, you would install the ODB compiler (odb), the common runtime library (libodb), plus one or more database-specific runtime libraries (libodb-<database>), depending on which database(s) you wish to target. To be able to persist types from either Boost or Qt you would also install the corresponding profile library.

Putting it all together, if, for example, you wish to use SQLite, run:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ./odb_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb-dev_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb-sqlite_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb-sqlite-dev_<...>.deb

Note that the .deb files must include a directory separator (/) in order for apt to recognize them as files rather than as package names.

Or, as another example, if you wish to use PostgreSQL as well as the Boost profile, run:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ./odb_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb-dev_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb-pgsql_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb-pgsql-dev_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb-boost_<...>.deb \
                       ./libodb-boost-dev_<...>.deb \
                       libboost1.81-dev \
                       postgresql-client

Notice that here we are also installing Boost version 1.81.0 and the PostgreSQL client program (psql) from the distribution's package repository.

To test the installation you can try to build and run an example, for example hello from the odb-examples source package (see examples README for details).

To build and run the example with SQLite, execute:

$ odb --std c++11 -d sqlite --generate-query --generate-schema \
  person.hxx
$ c++ -c person-odb.cxx
$ c++ -DDATABASE_SQLITE -c driver.cxx
$ c++ -o driver driver.o person-odb.o -lodb-sqlite -lodb -lsqlite3
$ ./driver --help
$ ./driver --database ./test.sqlite3

To build and run the example with PostgreSQL, execute:

$ odb --std c++11 -d pgsql --generate-query --generate-schema \
  person.hxx
$ c++ -c person-odb.cxx
$ c++ -DDATABASE_PGSQL -c driver.cxx
$ c++ -o driver driver.o person-odb.o -lodb-pgsql -lodb
$ psql --username=odb_test --dbname=odb_test -f person.sql
$ ./driver --help
$ ./driver --user odb_test --database odb_test