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Build from source

Building Nimbus from source ensures that all hardware-specific optimizations are turned on. The build process itself is simple and fully automated, but may take a few minutes.

Nim

Nimbus is written in the Nim programming language - the correct version will automatically be downloaded as part of the build process!

Prerequisites

Tip

If you are planning to use the precompiled binaries, you can skip this section and go straight to the binaries!

When building from source, you will need additional build dependencies to be installed:

  • Developer tools (C compiler, Make, Bash, Git)
  • CMake

On common Linux distributions the dependencies can be installed with

# Debian and Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install build-essential git cmake

# Fedora
dnf install @development-tools cmake

# Archlinux, using an AUR manager
yourAURmanager -S base-devel cmake

With Homebrew:

brew install cmake

To build Nimbus on Windows, the MinGW-w64 build environment is recommended.

Install Mingw-w64 for your architecture using the "MinGW-W64 Online Installer":

  1. Select your architecture in the setup menu (i686 on 32-bit, x86_64 on 64-bit)
  2. Set threads to win32
  3. Set exceptions to "dwarf" on 32-bit and "seh" on 64-bit.
  4. Change the installation directory to C:\mingw-w64 and add it to your system PATH in "My Computer"/"This PC" -> Properties -> Advanced system settings -> Environment Variables -> Path -> Edit -> New -> C:\mingw-w64\mingw64\bin (C:\mingw-w64\mingw32\bin on 32-bit)

Install Git for Windows and use a "Git Bash" shell to clone and build nimbus-eth2.

Note: If the online installer isn't working you can try installing mingw-w64 through MSYS2.

  • Install the Termux app from FDroid or the Google Play store
  • Install a PRoot of your choice following the instructions for your preferred distribution. Note, the Ubuntu PRoot is known to contain all Nimbus prerequisites compiled on Arm64 architecture (the most common architecture for Android devices).

Assuming you use Ubuntu PRoot

apt install build-essential git

Building the node

1. Clone the nimbus-eth2 repository

git clone https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2
cd nimbus-eth2

2. Run the beacon node build process

To build the Nimbus beacon node and its dependencies, run:

make -j4 nimbus_beacon_node

Tip

Omit -j4 on systems with 4GB of memory or less.