libcoap currently is available only as source archive or (preferably) can be cloned via Git. A debian package is being worked on.

Get the Code

Latest development releases are available as package for download, or from the git repository.

There is also a stable version which can also be cloned from git.

(Note that the former SF repository is outdated.)

Configuration

On platforms where POSIX system calls are available, the installation follows the usual configure/make cycle as described below.

Linux, Mac OSX and other POSIX platforms

If you have cloned the sources via git, you need to run ./autogen.sh to generate the build scripts. This step is optional when a source archive is used.

Next, say ./configure followed by make and make install.

Besides common GNU options, the configure script provides the following switches to control the build process:

• --enable-tests Will build the provided unit tests. This option requires cunit and its header files.
• --enable-examples Will build the included POSIX examples.
• --enable-documentation Will generate documentation for libcoap provided that doxygen, a2x, and the docbook XML and XSL packages are available. This option enables manual page generation and doxygen-based API reference generation. Selective override (enable or disable, respectively is possible with the following two switches:
  • --enable-manpages generate manual pages.
  • --enable-doxygen generate the doxygen-based API reference. generation.
• --enable-dtls enables linking against a DTLS library. By default, this option is enabled and will look for GnuTLS version 3.3.0 or higher, OpenSSL version 1.1.0 or higher, or tinyDTLS, in that order. The following switches allow selecting a specific DTLS library manually:
  • --with-gnutls select a GnuTLS library.
  • --with-openssl select an OpenSSL library.
  • --with-mbedtls select an Mbed TLS library.
  • --with-tinydtls select tinyDTLS.
• --enable-gcov enable gcov test coverage support.

Contiki

An example Contiki application can be found in examples/contiki. You need to run configure (possibly preceded by autogen.sh when cloned from git). The example Makefile will clone a the Contiki repository and create a symbolic link in Contiki’s apps directory to the libcoap root directory where Makefile.libcoap is located. After that, a simple server application is build by Makefile.contiki.

There is currently no DTLS support for libcoap with Contiki.

LwIP

Using libcoap with LwIP requires a hand-crafted Makefile. Please refer to examples/lwip/Makefile to see how this is done.

There is DTLS (TinyDTLS) support for libcoap with LwIP.

TinyOS

The usage of libcoap with TinyOS is documented in the TinyOS Wiki. Note that this implements an outdated version of the protocol.

There is no DTLS support for libcoap with TinyOS.