HarfBuzz primarily uses the meson build system. A community-maintained CMake build system is also available. Finally, you can build HarfBuzz without a build system by compiling the amalgamated source file.
First, we need to install desired dependencies. None of these are strictly required to build the library, but when they are present, you can build the library with additional integration features, such as FreeType integration.
The command-line tools (hb-view, hb-shape, hb-info, hb-subset) require GLib, while hb-view also requires Cairo. Most of the test suite requires GLib to run.
On Linux, install the development packages for FreeType, Cairo, and GLib. For example, on Ubuntu / Debian, you would do:
$ sudo apt-get install meson pkg-config ragel gtk-doc-tools gcc g++ libfreetype6-dev libglib2.0-dev libcairo2-dev
whereas on Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and other Red Hat based systems you would do:
$ sudo dnf install meson pkgconfig gtk-doc gcc gcc-c++ freetype-devel glib2-devel cairo-devel
and on ArchLinux and Manjaro:
$ sudo pacman -Suy meson pkg-config ragel gcc freetype2 glib2 glib2-devel cairo
On macOS:
brew install pkg-config ragel gtk-doc freetype glib cairo meson
Then use meson to build the project and run the tests, like:
meson build && ninja -Cbuild && meson test -Cbuild
On Windows, meson can build the project like above if a working MSVC's cl.exe (vcvarsall.bat) or gcc/clang is already on your path, and if you use something like meson build --wrap-mode=default it fetches and compiles most of the dependencies also. It is recommended to install CMake either manually or via the Visual Studio installer when building with MSVC, using meson.
Our CI configurations are also a good source of learning how to build HarfBuzz.
There is also amalgamated source provided with HarfBuzz which reduces whole process of building HarfBuzz to c++ -c src/harfbuzz.cc but there is no guarantee provided with buildability and reliability of features you get. This can be useful when embedding HarfBuzz in your project.
For example, the hb-shape tool can be built simply as:
$ c++ -O2 src/harfbuzz.cc util/hb-shape.cc -o hb-shape -I src -DHB_NO_FEATURES_H `pkg-config --cflags --libs glib-2.0`
See CONFIG.md for ideas on how to shrink the feature set of your custom built HarfBuzz library.