Building The Blockchain¶

Dependencies¶

component / version	minimum (not recommended but may work)	recommended	most recent of what we have ever tested
gcc (Linux)	8.4.0	9.4.0	12.3.0
llvm/clang (Linux)	UNKNOWN	7.0.1	8.0.0
MSVC (Windows)	2017 (15.9.30)	2022 (17.11.5)	2022 (17.12.3)
XCode (macOS)	12.3	14.3	15.2
CMake	3.26.3	3.26.3	3.31.6

Cloning¶

Be sure to clone the repository properly, with --recursive flag, or you'll get angry:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/letheanVPN/blockchain.git

Building¶

The project uses a Makefile that provides a simple and powerful interface for building. It automatically handles dependency installation with Conan and compilation with CMake.

You need CMake and Make installed on your system, other than that you don't need to worry about Python, Conan, Boost, OpenSSL, or any other dependencies.

The final packages are created as they are due to a historical distribution method used in china: USB Stick, CD, DVD, etc.

We use CPack, so our packages are self-contained, have searchable HTML documentation, and are ready to be installed on any system.

To skip the packing step, use make build as defined in the section below for Advanced Build Customization

Simple Workflow Builds (Recommended)¶

For most use cases, these two commands are all you need. They handle the entire build process from start to finish.

Build for Mainnet:
```
make mainnet
```
Build for Testnet:
```
make testnet
```

Creating Release Packages¶

To create distributable packages (e.g., .zip, .msi, .pkg, .deb), run the release target. This will build the project, build the documentation, and then package everything.

make release TESTNET=1

The final packages will be located in the build/packages/ directory

Advanced Build Customization (Makefile Variables)¶

For advanced use cases, you can override variables in the Makefile to customize the build process.

Build a testnet version:
```
make build TESTNET=1
```
Build a statically-linked version:
```
make build STATIC=1
```

Build a Debug build with 8 compile threads:

make build BUILD_TYPE=Debug CPU_CORES=8

Use custom CMakePresets:

make build PRESET_CONFIGURE=my-config-preset PRESET_BUILD=my-build-preset

Variable	Description	Default Value
`BUILD_TYPE`	Sets the build configuration (e.g., `Release`, `Debug`).	`Release`
`TESTNET`	Set to `1` to build for the test network.	`0`
`STATIC`	Set to `1` to link libraries statically.	`0`
`CPU_CORES`	Number of CPU cores to use for parallel compilation.	Auto-detected
`BUILD_VERSION`	The version string to embed in the binaries.	`6.0.1`
`BUILD_FOLDER`	The output directory for the build.	`build/release`
`PRESET_CONFIGURE`	The CMake preset to use for the `configure` step.	`conan-release`
`PRESET_BUILD`	The CMake preset to use for the `build` step.	`conan-release`
`CONAN_CACHE`	The path for the local Conan cache, where the dependencies are stored.	`./build/sdk`
`CONAN_EXECUTABLE`	The path to the usable Conan executable.	`./build/bin/conan`
`CONAN_URL`	The URL for the Conan remote repository.	`artifacts.host.uk.com`
`CONAN_USER`	The username for the Conan remote.	`public`
`CONAN_PASSWORD`	The password for the Conan remote.

Build Profiles (CMake Presets)¶

Our build system uses CMake Presets to manage configurations for different platforms, compilers, and build types. While the simple make mainnet and make testnet targets are sufficient for most developers, you can use presets for more granular control over the build process.

Presets are automatically detected from the cmake/presets directory. You can list available presets by checking the contents of CMakePresets.json and ConanPresets.json in the build directory after running a configure step.

Using Presets¶

To build with a specific preset, you can use the PRESET_CONFIGURE and PRESET_BUILD variables with the make build command.

For example, to build for Linux with GCC for x86_64 architecture, you might use a command like this:

make build PRESET_CONFIGURE=gcc-linux-x86_64

This is equivalent to the old build system's make gcc-linux-x86_64 target.

Available Presets¶

The following presets are commonly available, corresponding to different target platforms and architectures:

apple-clang-armv8: Apple Silicon (ARM64) with Apple Clang.
apple-clang-x86_64: Intel-based Macs (x86_64) with Apple Clang.
gcc-linux-x86_64: Linux (x86_64) with GCC.
gcc-linux-armv8: Linux (ARM64) with GCC.
msvc-194-x86_64: Windows (x86_64) with MSVC 2022.

You can also create your own presets for custom build configurations. Refer to the CMake documentation for more details on creating presets.

Cleaning the Build Directory¶

ALWAYS USE make clean to clean the build directory, manually deleting the build/release, build/SOME_FOLDER will cause you issues.

Our make clean triggers a cmake script that completely resets the build directory & dynamically added CMakePresets to its cached warm-up state,
the selective clean script can be edited here: cmake/CleanBuild.cmake or directly run from the repo root cmake -P cmake/CleanBuild.cmake

You can NUKE the build directory with make clean-build which is rm -rf build.

If you do manually delete build folders and get CMake errors (if you have compiled anything previously, you will), the ConanPresets.json file has entries in the include property, delete them all and try again.

This happens because CMakePresets.json includes ConanPresets.json, that has the list of toolchains to use that gets populated during the CMake config step, when you manually delete a folder, the toolchain is now a broken path, and CMake throws a fatal error.