NetHack – Plain Makefile Build

A single, self-contained GNUmakefile for building NetHack with GNU make, designed to be placed into a full NetHack source tree.

Prerequisites

• C compiler (GCC or Clang)
• pkg-config
• GNU make
• ncurses development package with Unicode support (e.g. libncursesw*-dev on Debian/Ubuntu, ncurses-devel on Fedora/openSUSE, ncurses on Arch Linux)
• git (to fetch Lua automatically at build time)

Usage

1. Copy the GNUmakefile into the root directory of a full NetHack source tree.
2. Run make.
3. make install installs to build/.
4. start nethack with cd build ; ./nethack.

make            # compiles src/nethack, util/recover, dat/nhdat, etc.
make install    # installs to build/
make clean      # removes build artifacts
make cleandeps  # also removes dependency files

macOS

Install dependencies via Homebrew:

brew install gmake pkg-config ncurses

The system ncurses lacks Unicode support; setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH tells pkg-config where to find Homebrew's ncurses installation:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$(brew --prefix ncurses)/lib/pkgconfig"
gmake
gmake install

License

This build system is licensed under the MIT license.