libserialport: cross-platform library for accessing serial ports

libserialport is a minimal library written in C that is intended to take care of the OS-specific details when writing software that uses serial ports.

By writing your serial code to use libserialport, you enable it to work transparently on any platform supported by the library.

The operations that are supported are:

• Port enumeration (obtaining a list of serial ports on the system).
• Opening and closing ports.
• Setting port parameters (baud rate, parity, etc).
• Reading, writing and flushing data.
• Obtaining error information.

libserialport is an open source project released under the LGPL3+ license.

Status

The library should build and work on any Windows or Unix-based system. If it does not, please submit a bug.

Enumeration is currently only implemented on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. On other systems enumeration is not supported, but ports can still be opened by name and then used.

If you know how to enumerate available ports on another OS, please submit a bug with this information, or better still a patch implementing it.

Future

Future versions will add additional API calls for obtaining metadata about a port, e.g. for USB devices the USB VID and PID of the underlying device.

Dependencies

On Linux, libudev is required. On other systems no other libraries are required.

The libudev dependency could be eliminated in favour of direct sysfs queries at the cost of some brevity. This is not currently a priority but if you feel like doing this feel free to submit a patch.

Building

The package uses a GNU style build system and requires a Unix style shell. On Windows it can be built with the MinGW toolchain and MSYS environment.

Run "./autogen.sh" to generate the build system, "./configure" to setup, then "make" to build the library and "make install" to install it.

API

Doxygen API documentation is included.