Installing MultiMarkdown 6 on Ubuntu 19.10

Markdown is a core part of many of my workflows. For quite a while, I’ve used Fletcher Penny’s MultiMarkdown processor (available on GitHub) on my various systems. Fletcher offers binary builds for Windows and macOS, but not a Linux binary. Three years ago, I wrote a post on how to compile MultiMarkdown 6 for a Fedora-based system. In this post, I’ll share how to compile it on an Ubuntu-based system.

Just as in the Fedora post, I used Vagrant with the Libvirt provider to spin up a temporary build VM.

In this clean build VM, I perform the following steps to build a multimarkdown binary:

1. Install the necessary packages with this command:

   sudo apt install gcc make cmake git build-essential
   

2. Clone the source code repository:

   git clone https://github.com/fletcher/MultiMarkdown-6
   

3. Switch into the directory where the repository was cloned and run these commands to build the binary:

   make
   cd build
   make
   

4. Once the second make command is done, you’re left with a multimarkdown binary. Copy that to the host system (scp works fine). Use vagrant destroy to clean up the temporary build VM once you’ve copied the binary to your host system.

And with that, you’re good to go!