Compiling Entware packages from source code

[!IMPORTANT] Make sure that the filesystem containing your working directory for compilation has at least 7 GiB of free disk space. You will need ~150 GiB of free space to compile the whole repository.

Install Dependencies

Entware builds packages using the OpenWrt SDK Build system, please install its dependencies first. If you choose to build the packages from Docker, the dependencies are automatically provided so you can move to the next step. Also, there are some package-specific dependencies:

Package	Dependencies
luajit	g++-multilib
7-zip	p7zip-full

Clone the Entware Git repository

git clone https://github.com/Entware/Entware.git && cd Entware

Building for deprecated architectures

There are some additional steps required if you are building packages for any of the deprecated architectures.

For armv7sf-k2.6 or x86-k2.6:

git fetch && git switch k2.6

For armv5sf-k3.2:

git fetch && git switch armv5-3.2

Update the package feeds

make package/symlinks

Activate a supported platform configuration

The OpenWRT SDK manages its configuration in a file named .config, located in its root directory. Pre-made configurations for most of the major target architectures are stored in the configs directory that is also located in the SDK's root directory. To make use of them, you need only to copy the desired configuration file into the root directory and rename it to .config. The example below demonstrates doing this for the MIPSEL platform:

cp -iv configs/mipsel-3.4.config .config

Rebuild the repository

make -j$(nproc)

Please refer to the OpenWrt Build system documentation for more details, and ask any questions you may have about its use on their forum.

Tips

[!TIP] You can build one package (squid, for example) with all its dependencies using only a single command. Example:

make package/squid/compile

[!TIP] If something goes wrong during compilation, turn on verbose mode by appending V=s to your make invocation for more detailed progress and error messages.

make package/tmux/compile V=s

[!TIP] You can speed up compilation on multi-processor systems by running several build threads simultaneously. Just add -j$(nproc) to the make invocation, like this:

make -j$(nproc) package/compile

Select only the targets you need to reduce build times

make -j$(nproc) tools/install
make -j$(nproc) toolchain/install
make -j$(nproc) target/compile
make -j$(nproc) package/compile

This can also be used in case you don't need to build all of the packages. Replace the final command in the sequence above (make -j$(nproc) package/compile) with the command required to build the package you need, though it may require a little modification. For instance, if you're getting an error during the compilation of a package…

…
root@host~$ make -C feeds/rtndev/telegram-cli host-compile
  …
  make[3] -C feeds/rtndev/telegram-cli host-compile
  make[3] -C feeds/rtndev/totd compile
  make -r world: build failed. Please re-run make with -j1 V=s or V=sc for a higher verbosity level to see what's going on

…follow the advice given and run 'make -j1 V=s' to better see what happened. Be aware, though, that you'll have a longer wait until the build system gets through all of the already-built packages. It's much more convenient to proceed directly to the package that failed, like this:

make -j1 package/feeds/rtndev/totd/compile V=s

Sometimes you have to omit the package section, for instance with the error message make[3] -C feeds/packages/utils/ttyd compile you would target it for compilation by invoking make this way:

make -j1 package/feeds/packages/ttyd/compile V=s

You can also run make printdb >log.txt and then search the log.txt file for the exact target name of the package you're interested in.

Errors in the tools or toolchain phases

In the event of an error during the tools/install or toolchain/install sections of the compilation that results in changes to your configuration in the .config file, remember that you'll need to use make dirclean rather than the usual make clean command. If you only want to clean one specific part of the tree, you can run make toolchain/uClibc/headers/clean instead.