*** With CMake *** yaml-cpp uses CMake to support cross-platform building. In a UNIX-like system, the basic steps to build are: 1. Download and install CMake (if you don't have root privileges, just install to a local directory, like ~/bin) 2. From the source directory, run: mkdir build cd build cmake .. and then the usual make make install 3. To clean up, just remove the 'build' directory. *** Without CMake *** If you don't want to use CMake, just add all .cpp files to a makefile. yaml-cpp does not need any special build settings, so no 'configure' file is necessary. (Note: this is pretty tedious. It's sooo much easier to use CMake.)