How to statically link libcurl? Linux

[oskarsh]

Hey, it seems like when you opening up your Plugin to the public there are more issues than expected, especially with the Linux Version...

I am currently building on Ubuntu 20.04 and I am using curl inside my plugin to fetch activation data. I've disabled lazy loading of curl since it would just crash the plugin when its not available. However I am having issues that in Bitwig libcurl-gnutls cannot be found. Can I statically compile it with the plugin to always make sure network calls are working regardless of the OS?

All the other DAWs are working except Bitwig, it reports back that it cannot find libcurl-gnutls.

Can I add it as an external library to link in Projucer?
How are you people handling network calls and curl in your Linux VSTs?

Thanks in advance!

[oskarsh]

The issue comes from using libcurl4-gnutls which is not installed by default on ubuntu 20.04 but is required if you choose not to lazy load this library. Since basically every Linux os has libcurl installed it should still load fine however the problem is that is requires libcurl4 while older OS only have libcurl3 installed.

I read somewhere that you can just link -lcurl in projucer and have the OS figure out what libcurl version to use, however I was not sure on how to achieve that.

I went to the Bitwig Discord and asked the smart people here. Their best solution was to check if libcurl4 is installed in my install script and prompt the user to install it before installing the vst.

Are there any better solutions for this?

[d.healey]

@oskarsh The solution is to always build your projects you are releasing to others on an older version. I use Linux Mint 17.something - which I think is Ubuntu 16.something.

[oskarsh]

@d-healey I've installed an old ubuntu version and compiled the Plugin again! I will keep that in mind and set up this VM only for compiling. Thanks!