Building The Blockchain¶

⚠️ Notice
Please make sure you have read the Developer Onboarding Guide before continuing.

This project uses a Makefile for building and Conan for dependency management. The primary build targets and instructions are below.

Simple Compile Instructions¶

One of the historical issues for the project has been the complexity of building the codebase. Our system is designed to be as simple as possible, with a single Makefile to rule them all.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/letheanVPN/blockchain.git
make build TESTNET=1

That's it! Project dependencies will be installed automatically via Conan, Conan is downloaded, the system version is ignored; So it will never conflict with any existing Conan installation you may have, we also host a compile cache, speeding up compile time even more.

Everything below is optional, for developers, you can just run make help or just make to see available targets.

Dependency Setup (Conan)¶

Dependencies are managed via Conan. The required libraries are listed in conanfile.txt:

zlib
boost
openssl
miniupnpc
jwt-cpp

Conan will automatically install these when you build.

WindowsMacOSLinux

choco install conan

brew install conan

apt-get install pipx
pipx ensurepath
refresh
pipx install conan

Compile Using Make¶

Run make help to see available targets. Common targets include:

release: Build a release version.
debug: Build a debug version.
static: Build a static release.
clean: Remove all build directories.
help: Show help message.

Build Targets¶

Profiles are defined in cmake/profiles/. For each profile, a target is generated:

make <profile>

Example:

make apple-clang-armv8

This builds using the specified profile; the list of targets is:

make apple-clang-armv8
make apple-clang-x86_64
make gcc-linux-x86_64
make gcc-linux-armv8
make msvc-194-x86_64

Testnet Builds¶

Builds default to mainnet. To create a testnet build, you need to add TESTNET=1 with your make command, e.g make apple-clang-armv8 TESTNET=1

Compile Using CMake¶

The project uses CMake, the Makefile is just a wrapper; libraries are found using find_package, so either have them installed or you can use Conan to install them by adding:

-DCMAKE_PROJECT_TOP_LEVEL_INCLUDES="cmake/conan_provider.cmake"

Putting that together, an example command would be:

cmake -B build/debug -S . -DCMAKE_PROJECT_TOP_LEVEL_INCLUDES=cmake/conan_provider.cmake -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DSTATIC=1 -DTESTNET=1
cmake --build=build/debug --config=Release

Documentation¶

Please ensure code improvements also come with documentation updates. The documentation project is integrated. Into the blockchain repo, with helper CMake functions to build and run a local server.

Prerequisites¶

WindowsMacOSLinux

choco install python --pre 
pip install -r docs/requirements.txt

brew install python@3.9
pip3 install -r docs/requirements.txt

apt-get install pipx
pipx ensurepath
refresh
pipx install -r docs/requirements.txt

Documentation Targets¶

make docs: Build documentation.
make docs-dev: Serve documentation for local development http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Other Targets¶

test: Build and run tests (release mode).
test-debug: Build and run tests (debug mode).
docs: Build documentation.
docs-dev: Serve development documentation.
tags: Generate C++ tags for code navigation.

Example Usage¶

Build release¶

make release

Build debug¶

make debug

Compile for Windows¶

make msvc-194-x86_64

Compile for Linux¶

make gcc-linux-x86_64

Compile for Apple ARM¶

make apple-clang-armv8

Compile for Apple AMD64¶

make apple-clang-x86_64

Clean build directories¶

make clean

Notes¶

Builds are parallelised based on your CPU cores.
Conan profiles are auto-detected if missing.
All build artefacts are placed in the build/ directory.