Building Bitcoin-Core

Building Berkley DB

Berkley DB is needed to access the wallet.

Get Berkley DB from Oracle. Make sure you get version 4.8 (as of 2017-06-21)

Build it:

tar xfvz db-4.8.30.tar.gz
cd db-4.8.30
cd build_unix
../dist/configure --enable-cxx --disable-shared --with-pic
make
sudo make install

By default, the headers and the library are installed under /usr/local into the directory BerkeleyDB.4.8.

To choose another destination, use --prefix=/path/to/desired/location/ in the configure line.

Boost

Boost version 1.47 or higher is also needed (as of 2017-06-21)

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev

Arch-Linux:

sudo pacman -S boost boost-libs

libprotobuf

Apparently, libprotobuf is needed for the frontend (bitcoin-qt).

sudo apt-get install protobuf-compiler

libevent

Not sure what libevent is needed for …

sudo apt-get install libevent-dev

Qt

Getting Qt

On arch linux:

sudo pacman -S qt5

This installs quite a lot. Possibly, a smaller subset would be sufficient.

On Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install qtdeclarative5-dev

Building bitcoin itself

Get the sources from github:

cd /path/of/building/directory
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
cd bitcoin

./autogen.sh

configuring

Note the specific declaration of the location of Berkeley DB:

# ./configure LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8/lib/" CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8/include/"
./configure LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8/lib/" CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8/include/" --with-gui=qt5

Also seen: configure … --with-qt

The executables can also be configured for debugging:

./configure … --enable-debug

or

./configure CXXFLAGS="-g -ggdb -O0" …

Alternatively, also consider using the executable's -debug=… flag.

making

make -s -j5

output

The following executables should have been built:

src/bitcoind
src/bitcoin-cli
src/bitcoin-tx
src/qt/bitcoin-qt

TODO

Doxygen documentation can apparently be created from the root directory by executing

$ doxygen doc/Doxygen

The generated documentation then goes to doc/doxygen/html.

Links

This github gist was useful.