Build Serial Studio From Source (GPLv3)

Serial Studio's core is free and open source under the GPLv3, and building it yourself is straightforward. You might do it to run the fully open edition, to audit what the app does, or to contribute a fix. This walks through the requirements and the build on each platform. It follows the instructions in the project's repository, which is the source of truth if anything here drifts.

What the GPL build includes

Compiling from source produces the GPLv3 edition. That is the full core: the Serial/UART, TCP/UDP, and Bluetooth LE drivers, the Project Editor, Quick Plot and Console modes, the standard widgets (line plot, gauge, bar, GPS map, FFT, accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, data grid, LED panel, terminal, multi-plot), the built-in, JavaScript, and Lua frame parsers, per-dataset transforms, CSV export, and the local TCP and MCP APIs.

The Pro-only modules are not part of this build: MQTT, Modbus, CAN Bus, audio, USB, HID, and Process I/O drivers, multi-source projects, the 3D Plot, XY Plot, Waterfall, Image View, and Painter widgets, the output widgets, MDF4, the session database and reports, file transfer, the importers, and the AI Assistant. Some of those depend on proprietary Qt modules; others are commercial-licensed code.

Requirements

You need three things regardless of platform:

• Qt 6.9 or later (6.11.1 is recommended).
• A C++20 compiler: GCC 10+ on Linux, Clang 12+ on macOS, or MSVC 2019+ on Windows.
• CMake 3.20 or later.

All the C/C++ dependencies (zlib, expat, OpenSSL, KissFFT, and the rest) are either vendored in the repository or fetched automatically by CMake, so there is no package manager step for them.

Platform setup

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu shown; install Qt 6 from your distribution or the official installer):

sudo apt install libgl1-mesa-dev build-essential

macOS:

xcode-select --install
brew install qt@6

Windows: install Visual Studio 2019 or later with the C++ workload, and Qt 6 from the official Qt installer.

Building

Clone the repository, then configure and build with CMake:

git clone https://github.com/Serial-Studio/Serial-Studio.git
cd Serial-Studio
cmake -B build -DPRODUCTION_OPTIMIZATION=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j

That is the whole process. If you prefer an IDE, you can open CMakeLists.txt directly in Qt Creator or any CMake-aware editor with no extra setup, and build from there. When it finishes, you have a working GPLv3 build of Serial Studio.

What a source build does and doesn't grant

This part matters and is easy to miss. Building from source gives you the GPLv3 edition, which is intended for personal, educational, and open-source use. Commercial use of Serial Studio requires a Pro license even if you compiled it yourself. Seeing the source does not by itself grant commercial rights; each file carries an SPDX license header that says how it may be used. If you are using it at work or in a product, that is what the Pro license is for, and it also unlocks the modules the GPL build leaves out.

For a first run once it is built, the getting-started guide covers connecting a device, and What Is Serial Studio? is the wider tour of what you just compiled.