Building on Unix with gcc and autotools Home page for json-c: http://oss.metaparadigm.com/json-c/ If checking out from SVN (http://svn.metaparadigm.com/svn/json-c/trunk) or Git (https://github.com/jehiah/json-c): $ sh autogen.sh Then $ ./configure $ make $ make install To build and run the test programs run $ make check Linking to libjson If your system has pkgconfig then you can just add this to your makefile CFLAGS += $(shell pkg-config --cflags json) LDFLAGS += $(shell pkg-config --libs json)