Installation

Cage may be packaged for your distribution, see repology. This should be your preferred way to install Cage, unless that version is old or you need a newer feature not yet packaged.

To build Cage from source, you can grab a release. The release specifies which version of wlroots it should be built against. Releases are signed with 6EBC43B1. Alternatively, you can grab the latest master branch from GitHub. Note that Cage is developed against the latest tag of wlroots, in order to not constantly chase breaking changes as soon as they occur.

Cage is built with the meson build system. It requires wayland, wlroots and xkbcommon to be installed. Simply execute the following steps to build Cage:

$ meson build
$ ninja -C build

By default, this builds a debug build. To build a release build, use meson build --buildtype=release.

Cage comes with compile-time support for XWayland. To enable this, first make sure that your version of wlroots is compiled with this option. Then, add -Dxwayland=true to the meson command above. Note that you'll need to have the XWayland binary installed on your system for this to work.

You can run Cage by running ./build/cage APPLICATION. If you run it from within an existing X11 or Wayland session, it will open in a virtual output as a window in your existing session. If you run it at a TTY, it'll run with the KMS+DRM backend. In debug mode (default build type with Meson), press Alt+Esc to quit. For more configuration options, see Configuration.