Why To Build From Source

The primary reason to build from source is in order to participate in the development process of Zig itself. Building from source means that you can make changes to Zig itself and then test out those changes.

If your goal is to install a specific version of Zig, you can find pre-built tarballs on the download page. You could also try installing Zig from a package manager. Finally, there is zig-bootstrap to cross-compile an installation of Zig from source for any target. When using zig-bootstrap, be sure to check out the git tag corresponding to the version you want to build, as master branch is not kept in any coherent state.

When building from source, pay attention to which commits failed and succeeded CI checks. Check the commit history and notice which commits succeeded (:heavy_check_mark:) or failed (:x:). You will want to check out the latest master branch commit that succeeded in order to avoid bugs in the most recent commits.

If you run into trouble, first refer to Troubleshooting Build Issues, and then ask politely for help in one of the Community spaces.

The following steps are for Unix-like operating systems. For Windows, refer to Building Zig on Windows.

It is recommended to follow Option A after doing a git pull, modifying the cmake line with -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release and then following Option B while working on a feature branch, using Option A as your prior build of Zig.

Option A: Use Your System Installed Build Tools

Dependencies

• cmake >= 3.5
• gcc >= 7.0.0 or clang >= 6.0.0
• LLVM, Clang, LLD development libraries == 17.x, compiled with the same gcc or clang version above
  • Use the system package manager, or build from source.

Instructions

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make install

Please be aware of the handy cmake variable CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. CMake will look for LLVM and other dependencies in this location first.

This produces stage3/bin/zig which is the Zig compiler built by itself.

For macOS + Homebrew

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DZIG_STATIC_LLVM=ON -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$(brew --prefix llvm@17);$(brew --prefix zstd)"
make install

For FreeBSD

sudo pkg install -qyr FreeBSD devel/llvm17 devel/cmake archivers/zstd textproc/libxml2 archivers/lzma
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DZIG_STATIC_LLVM=ON -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="/usr/local/llvm17;/usr/local"
make install

Option B: Use a Pre-Built Zig Binary

Dependencies

• A recent prior build of Zig. The exact version required depends on how recently breaking changes occurred. If the language or std lib changed too much since this version, then this strategy will fail with compilation errors, and you must use Option A above.
• LLVM, Clang, and LLD libraries built using Zig.

The easiest way to obtain both of these artifacts is to use zig-bootstrap, which creates the directory out/zig-$target-$cpu and out/$target-$cpu, to be used as $ZIG_PREFIX and $LLVM_PREFIX, respectively, in the following command:

Instructions

"$ZIG_PREFIX/bin/zig" build \
  -p stage3 \
  --search-prefix "$LLVM_PREFIX" \
  --zig-lib-dir lib \
  -Dstatic-llvm

Where $LLVM_PREFIX is the path that contains, for example, include/llvm/Pass.h and lib/libLLVMCore.a.

This produces stage3/bin/zig. See zig build -h to learn about the options that can be passed such as -Drelease.