Some notes on how to build Bitcoin ABC in Unix.
Before you start building, please make sure that your compiler supports C++17.
It is recommended to create a build directory to build out-of-tree.
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -GNinja ..
ninja
ninja install # optional
This will build bitcoin-qt as well.
Note: Bitcoin ABC provides a Docker image with all the dependencies preinstalled.
These dependencies are required:
| Library | Purpose | Description |
|---|---|---|
| libssl | Crypto | Random Number Generation, Elliptic Curve Cryptography |
| libboost | Utility | Library for threading, data structures, etc |
| libevent | Networking | OS independent asynchronous networking |
Optional dependencies:
| Library | Purpose | Description |
|---|---|---|
| miniupnpc | UPnP Support | Firewall-jumping support |
| libnatpmp | NAT-PMP Support | Firewall-jumping support |
| libdb | Berkeley DB | Wallet storage (only needed when wallet enabled) |
| libsqlite3 | SQLite 3 | Wallet storage (only needed when wallet enabled) |
| jemalloc | Memory allocator | Library to enhance the memory allocation and improve performances |
| qt | GUI | GUI toolkit (only needed when GUI enabled) |
| protobuf | Payments in GUI | Data interchange format used for payment protocol (only needed when BIP70 enabled) |
| libqrencode | QR codes in GUI | Optional for generating QR codes (only needed when GUI enabled) |
| univalue | Utility | JSON parsing and encoding (bundled version will be used unless –with-system-univalue passed to configure) |
| libzmq3 | ZMQ notification | Optional, allows generating ZMQ notifications (requires ZMQ version >= 4.1.5) |
| systemtap | Tracing (USDT) | Optional, statically defined tracepoints |
For the versions used, see dependencies.md
C++ compilers are memory-hungry. It is recommended to have at least 1.5 GB of memory available when compiling Bitcoin ABC. On systems with less, gcc can be tuned to conserve memory with additional CXXFLAGS:
cmake -GNinja .. -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="--param ggc-min-expand=1 --param ggc-min-heapsize=32768"
Build requirements:
sudo apt-get install bsdmainutils build-essential cmake libssl-dev libevent-dev lld ninja-build python3 python3-pytest
Installing cmake on older distribution (Debian < 11 or Ubuntu < 20.04):
On Debian Buster (10), cmake should be installed from the backports repository:
echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -t buster-backports install cmake
If the cmake packaged version is too old it can be installed from the Kitware APT repository:
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates gnupg software-properties-common wget
wget -O - https://apt.kitware.com/keys/kitware-archive-latest.asc 2>/dev/null | sudo apt-key add -
Add the repository corresponding to your version (see instructions from Kitware). For Ubuntu Bionic (18.04):
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://apt.kitware.com/ubuntu/ bionic main'
Then update the package list and install cmake:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install cmake
Now, you can either build from self-compiled depends or install the required dependencies with the following instructions.
Options when installing required Boost library files:
On at least Ubuntu 16.04+ and Debian 9+ there are generic names for the individual boost development packages, so the following can be used to only install necessary parts of boost:
sudo apt-get install libboost-dev
If that doesn’t work, you can install all boost development packages with:
sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev
BerkeleyDB 5.3 or later and SQLite 3.7 or later are required for the wallet. These can be installed with:
sudo apt-get install libdb-dev libdb++-dev libsqlite3-dev
See the section “Disable-wallet mode” to build Bitcoin ABC without wallet.
Port mapping dependencies MiniUPnPc and NAT-PMP (can be disabled by passing -DENABLE_UPNP=OFF and -DENABLE_NATPMP=OFF on the cmake command line):
sudo apt-get install libminiupnpc-dev libnatpmp-dev
ZMQ dependencies (provides ZMQ API, can be disabled by passing -DBUILD_BITCOIN_ZMQ=OFF on the cmake command line):
sudo apt-get install libzmq3-dev
jemalloc dependencies (provides the jemalloc library, can be disabled by passing -DUSE_JEMALLOC=OFF on the cmake command line):
sudo apt-get install libjemalloc-dev
User-Space, Statically Defined Tracing (USDT) dependencies (provides the tracepoint library, can be disabled by passing -DENABLE_TRACING=OFF on the cmake command line):
sudo apt install systemtap-sdt-dev
If you want to build bitcoin-qt, make sure that the required packages for Qt development
are installed. Qt 5 is necessary to build the GUI.
To build without GUI pass -DBUILD_BITCOIN_QT=OFF on the cmake command line.
To build with Qt 5 you need the following:
sudo apt-get install libqt5gui5 libqt5core5a libqt5dbus5 qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler
libqrencode dependencies (can be disabled by passing -DENABLE_QRCODE=OFF on the cmake command line):
sudo apt-get install libqrencode-dev
Build requirements:
sudo dnf install boost-devel cmake gcc-c++ libdb-cxx-devel libdb-devel libevent-devel ninja-build openssl-devel python3
Port mapping dependencies MiniUPnPc and NAT-PMP (can be disabled by passing -DENABLE_UPNP=OFF and -DENABLE_NATPMP=OFF on the cmake command line):
sudo dnf install miniupnpc-devel libnatpmp-devel
ZMQ dependencies (can be disabled by passing -DBUILD_BITCOIN_ZMQ=OFF on the cmake command line):
sudo dnf install zeromq-devel
User-Space, Statically Defined Tracing (USDT) dependencies (provides the tracepoint library, can be disabled by passing -DENABLE_TRACING=OFF on the cmake command line):
sudo dnf install systemtap
To build with Qt 5 you need the following:
sudo dnf install qt5-qttools-devel qt5-qtbase-devel protobuf-devel
libqrencode dependencies (can be disabled by passing -DENABLE_QRCODE=OFF):
sudo dnf install qrencode-devel
SQLite can be installed with:
sudo dnf install sqlite-devel
The release is built with GCC and then “strip bitcoind” to strip the debug symbols, which reduces the executable size by about 90%.
miniupnpc may be used for UPnP port mapping. It can be downloaded from here. UPnP support is compiled in and turned off by default. See the cmake options for UPnP behavior desired:
ENABLE_UPNP Enable UPnP support (miniupnp required, default ON)
START_WITH_UPNP UPnP support turned on by default at runtime (default OFF)
libnatpmp may be used for NAT-PMP port mapping. It can be downloaded from here. NAT-PMP support is compiled in and turned off by default. See the configure options for NAT-PMP behavior desired:
ENABLE_NATPMP NAT-PMP support (libnatpmp required, default ON)
START_WITH_NATPMP NAT-PMP support turned on by default at runtime (default OFF)
For documentation on building Boost look at their official documentation: http://www.boost.org/build/doc/html/bbv2/installation.html
To help make your Bitcoin ABC installation more secure by making certain attacks impossible to
exploit even if a vulnerability is found, binaries are hardened by default.
This can be disabled by passing -DENABLE_HARDENING=OFF.
Hardening enables the following features:
Position Independent Executable: Build position independent code to take advantage of Address Space Layout Randomization offered by some kernels. Attackers who can cause execution of code at an arbitrary memory location are thwarted if they don’t know where anything useful is located. The stack and heap are randomly located by default, but this allows the code section to be randomly located as well.
On an AMD64 processor where a library was not compiled with -fPIC, this will cause an error such as: “relocation R_X86_64_32 against `……’ can not be used when making a shared object;”
To test that you have built PIE executable, install scanelf, part of paxutils, and use:
scanelf -e ./bitcoin
The output should contain:
TYPE
ET_DYN
Non-executable Stack: If the stack is executable then trivial stack-based buffer overflow exploits are possible if vulnerable buffers are found. By default, Bitcoin ABC should be built with a non-executable stack, but if one of the libraries it uses asks for an executable stack or someone makes a mistake and uses a compiler extension which requires an executable stack, it will silently build an executable without the non-executable stack protection.
To verify that the stack is non-executable after compiling use:
scanelf -e ./bitcoin
The output should contain:
STK/REL/PTL
RW- R-- RW-
The STK RW- means that the stack is readable and writeable but not executable.
When the intention is to run only a P2P node without a wallet, Bitcoin ABC may be compiled in
disable-wallet mode by passing -DBUILD_BITCOIN_WALLET=OFF on the cmake command line.
Mining is also possible in disable-wallet mode using the getblocktemplate RPC call.
A list of the cmake options and their current value can be displayed.
From the build subdirectory (see above), run cmake -LH ...
This example lists the steps necessary to setup and build a command line only, non-wallet distribution of the latest changes on Arch Linux:
pacman -S base-devel boost cmake git libevent ninja python
git clone https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc.git
cd bitcoin-abc/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -GNinja .. -DBUILD_BITCOIN_WALLET=OFF -DBUILD_BITCOIN_QT=OFF -DENABLE_UPNP=OFF -DBUILD_BITCOIN_ZMQ=OFF -DUSE_JEMALLOC=OFF
ninja
These steps can be performed on, for example, a Debian VM. The depends system will also work on other Linux distributions, however the commands for installing the toolchain will be different.
Make sure you install all the build requirements mentioned above. Then, install the toolchain and some additional dependencies:
sudo apt-get install autoconf automake curl g++-aarch64-linux-gnueabihf gcc-aarch64-linux-gnueabihf gperf pkg-config
To build executables for AArch64:
cd depends
make build-linux-aarch64
cd ..
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -GNinja .. -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../cmake/platforms/LinuxAArch64.cmake -DENABLE_GLIBC_BACK_COMPAT=ON -DENABLE_STATIC_LIBSTDCXX=ON
ninja
For further documentation on the depends system see README.md in the depends directory.
Bitcoin ABC provides a Docker image with all the dependencies pre-installed, based on Debian. If the dependencies cannot be installed on your system but it can run a Docker container, this image can be pulled and used for the build.
Note: The image has all the dependencies and can weight a few gigabytes.
To get the latest image (current master):
docker pull bitcoinabc/bitcoin-abc-dev
It is also possible to use a release version. Example for 0.22.4:
docker pull bitcoinabc/bitcoin-abc-dev:0.22.4
Running the container will start a bash shell at the project root:
# On the host
docker run -it bitcoinabc/bitcoin-abc-dev
# Start the build in the container
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -GNinja ..
ninja
It is possible to bind the project to a local directory on the host machine. First create an empty volume on the host:
# On the host
mkdir bitcoin-abc-volume
docker volume create \
--driver local \
--opt type=none \
--opt device=${PWD}/bitcoin-abc-volume \
--opt o=bind \
bitcoin-abc-volume
Then start the container with the volume bound to /bitcoin-abc:
docker run -it -v bitcoin-abc-volume:/bitcoin-abc bitcoinabc/bitcoin-abc-dev