Building BOINC applications

When building a BOINC application, you typically

• want versions for several platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux);
• want each version to run on a wide range of volunteered computers (e.g. the Linux/x86 version should run on Linux systems of many ages and types).

Achieving these goals can be challenging. However, BOINC provides tools and example files that simplify the task.

Note: if you develop apps that run in VirtualBox virtual machines these challenges disappear, and this page is not relevant.

Whether you're creating a new application or adapting an existing application to BOINC, we recommend that you start by building the BOINC sample application example_app on all the platforms you want to support. When this is done, you can use the example application and its associated project files as a basis for your own application.

The first step in building the example application on a given host is to download the BOINC source code on that host.