Depending on what platform or features you need, the build process may differ. After you've built a binary, running the test suite to confirm that the binary works as intended is a good next step.
If you can reproduce a test failure, search for it in the Node.js issue tracker or file a new issue.
- Supported platforms
- Building Node.js on supported platforms
- Building Node.js with FIPS-compliant OpenSSL
- Building Node.js with external core modules
This list of supported platforms is current as of the branch/release to which it belongs.
Node.js relies on V8 and libuv. We adopt a subset of their supported platforms.
There are three support tiers:
- Tier 1: Full test coverage and maintenance by the Node.js core team and the broader community.
- Tier 2: Full test coverage. Limited maintenance, often provided by the vendor of the platform.
- Experimental: May not compile or test suite may not pass. These are often approaching Tier 2 support but are not quite ready. There is at least one individual providing maintenance.
For production applications, run Node.js on supported platforms only.
Node.js does not support a platform version if a vendor has expired support for it. In other words, Node.js does not support running on End-of-life (EoL) platforms. This is true regardless of entries in the table below.
System | Support type | Version | Architectures | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
GNU/Linux | Tier 1 | kernel >= 2.6.32, glibc >= 2.12 | x64, arm | |
GNU/Linux | Tier 1 | kernel >= 3.10, glibc >= 2.17 | arm64 | |
macOS/OS X | Tier 1 | >= 10.11 | x64 | |
Windows | Tier 1 | >= Windows 7/2008 R2/2012 R2 | x86, x64 | 1,2,3 |
SmartOS | Tier 2 | >= 16 | x64 | |
FreeBSD | Tier 2 | >= 11 | x64 | |
GNU/Linux | Tier 2 | kernel >= 3.13.0, glibc >= 2.19 | ppc64le >=power8 | |
AIX | Tier 2 | >= 7.1 TL04 | ppc64be >=power7 | |
GNU/Linux | Tier 2 | kernel >= 3.10, glibc >= 2.17 | s390x | |
GNU/Linux | Experimental | kernel >= 2.6.32, glibc >= 2.12 | x86 | limited CI |
Linux (musl) | Experimental | musl >= 1.0 | x64 |
1: Tier 1 support for building on Windows is only on 64-bit hosts. Support is experimental for 32-bit hosts.
2: On Windows, running Node.js in Windows terminal emulators
like mintty
requires the usage of winpty
for the tty channels to work correctly (e.g. winpty node.exe script.js
).
In "Git bash" if you call the node shell alias (node
without the .exe
extension), winpty
is used automatically.
3: The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is not directly
supported, but the GNU/Linux build process and binaries should work. The
community will only address issues that reproduce on native GNU/Linux
systems. Issues that only reproduce on WSL should be reported in the
WSL issue tracker. Running the
Windows binary (node.exe
) in WSL is not recommended. It will not work
without workarounds such as stdio redirection.
Depending on the host platform, the selection of toolchains may vary.
- GCC 4.9.4 or newer
- Clang 3.4.2 or newer
- GCC 6.3 or newer
- Visual Studio 2017 with the Windows 10 SDK on a 64-bit host.
OpenSSL-1.1.1 requires the following assembler version for use of asm support on x86_64 and ia32.
For use of AVX-512,
- gas (GNU assembler) version 2.26 or higher
- nasm version 2.11.8 or higher in Windows
Note that AVX-512 is disabled for Skylake-X by OpenSSL-1.1.1.
For use of AVX2,
- gas (GNU assembler) version 2.23 or higher
- Xcode version 5.0 or higher
- llvm version 3.3 or higher
- nasm version 2.10 or higher in Windows
Please refer to https://www.openssl.org/docs/man1.1.1/man3/OPENSSL_ia32cap.html for details.
If compiling without one of the above, use configure
with the
--openssl-no-asm
flag. Otherwise, configure
will fail.
The bootstrapping guide explains how to install all prerequisites.
gcc
andg++
4.9.4 or newer, orclang
andclang++
3.4.2 or newer (macOS: latest Xcode Command Line Tools)- Python 2.7
- Python 2.7 end of life is in 2019 so a transition to Python 3 is underway.
- Python 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7 are experimental.
- GNU Make 3.81 or newer
On macOS, install the Xcode Command Line Tools
by running
xcode-select --install
. Alternatively, if you already have the full Xcode
installed, you can find them under the menu Xcode -> Open Developer Tool -> More Developer Tools...
. This step will install clang
, clang++
, and
make
.
If the path to your build directory contains a space, the build will likely fail.
On FreeBSD and OpenBSD, you may also need:
- libexecinfo
To build Node.js:
$ ./configure
$ make -j4
The -j4
option will cause make
to run 4 simultaneous compilation jobs which
may reduce build time. For more information, see the
GNU Make Documentation.
Note that the above requires that python
resolve to Python 2.7 and not a newer
version. See Prerequisites.
After building, setting up firewall rules can avoid popups asking to accept incoming network connections when running tests.
Running the following script on macOS will add the firewall rules for the
executable node
in the out
directory and the symbolic node
link in the
project's root directory.
$ sudo ./tools/macos-firewall.sh
To verify the build:
$ make test-only
At this point, you are ready to make code changes and re-run the tests.
If you are running tests before submitting a Pull Request, the recommended command is:
$ make -j4 test
make -j4 test
does a full check on the codebase, including running linters and
documentation tests.
Make sure the linter does not report any issues and that all tests pass. Please do not submit patches that fail either check.
If you want to run the linter without running tests, use
make lint
/vcbuild lint
. It will run both JavaScript linting and
C++ linting.
If you are updating tests and just want to run a single test to check it:
$ python tools/test.py -J --mode=release parallel/test-stream2-transform
You can execute the entire suite of tests for a given subsystem by providing the name of a subsystem:
$ python tools/test.py -J --mode=release child-process
If you want to check the other options, please refer to the help by using
the --help
option:
$ python tools/test.py --help
You can usually run tests directly with node:
$ ./node ./test/parallel/test-stream2-transform.js
Remember to recompile with make -j4
in between test runs if you change code in
the lib
or src
directories.
The tests attempt to detect support for IPv6 and exclude IPv6 tests if appropriate. If your main interface has IPv6 addresses, then your loopback interface must also have '::1' enabled. For some default installations on Ubuntu that does not seem to be the case. To enable '::1' on the loopback interface on Ubuntu:
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6=0
It's good practice to ensure any code you add or change is covered by tests. You can do so by running the test suite with coverage enabled:
$ ./configure --coverage
$ make coverage
A detailed coverage report will be written to coverage/index.html
for
JavaScript coverage and to coverage/cxxcoverage.html
for C++ coverage
(if you only want to run the JavaScript tests then you do not need to run
the first command ./configure --coverage
).
Generating a test coverage report can take several minutes.
To collect coverage for a subset of tests you can set the CI_JS_SUITES
and
CI_NATIVE_SUITES
variables (to run specific suites, e.g., child-process
, in
isolation, unset the opposing _SUITES
variable):
$ CI_JS_SUITES=child-process CI_NATIVE_SUITES= make coverage
The above command executes tests for the child-process
subsystem and
outputs the resulting coverage report.
Alternatively, you can run make coverage-run-js
, to execute JavaScript tests
independently of the C++ test suite:
$ CI_JS_SUITES=fs CI_NATIVE_SUITES= make coverage-run-js
The make coverage
command downloads some tools to the project root directory.
To clean up after generating the coverage reports:
$ make coverage-clean
To build the documentation:
This will build Node.js first (if necessary) and then use it to build the docs:
$ make doc
If you have an existing Node.js build, you can build just the docs with:
$ NODE=/path/to/node make doc-only
To read the documentation:
$ man doc/node.1
If you prefer to read the documentation in a browser,
run the following after make doc
is finished:
$ make docopen
This will open a browser with the documentation.
To test if Node.js was built correctly:
$ ./node -e "console.log('Hello from Node.js ' + process.version)"
To install this version of Node.js into a system directory:
$ [sudo] make install
If you run into an issue where the information provided by the JS stack trace is not enough, or if you suspect the error happens outside of the JS VM, you can try to build a debug enabled binary:
$ ./configure --debug
$ make -j4
make
with ./configure --debug
generates two binaries, the regular release
one in out/Release/node
and a debug binary in out/Debug/node
, only the
release version is actually installed when you run make install
.
To use the debug build with all the normal dependencies overwrite the release version in the install directory:
$ make install --prefix=/opt/node-debug/
$ cp -a -f out/Debug/node /opt/node-debug/node
When using the debug binary, core dumps will be generated in case of crashes. These core dumps are useful for debugging when provided with the corresponding original debug binary and system information.
Reading the core dump requires gdb
built on the same platform the core dump
was captured on (i.e. 64-bit gdb
for node
built on a 64-bit system, Linux
gdb
for node
built on Linux) otherwise you will get errors like
not in executable format: File format not recognized
.
Example of generating a backtrace from the core dump:
$ gdb /opt/node-debug/node core.node.8.1535359906
$ backtrace
Prerequisites:
- Python 2.7
- The "Desktop development with C++" workload from Visual Studio 2017 or the "Visual C++ build tools" workload from the Build Tools, with the default optional components.
- Basic Unix tools required for some tests,
Git for Windows includes Git Bash
and tools which can be included in the global
PATH
. - The NetWide Assembler, for OpenSSL assembler modules.
If not installed in the default location, it needs to be manually added
to
PATH
. A build with theopenssl-no-asm
option does not need this, nor does a build targeting ARM64 Windows. - Optional (to build the MSI): the WiX Toolset v3.11 and the Wix Toolset Visual Studio 2017 Extension.
- Optional Requirements for compiling for Windows 10 on ARM (ARM64):
- ARM64 Windows build machine
- Due to a GYP limitation, this is required to run compiled code generation tools (like V8's builtins and mksnapshot tools)
- Visual Studio 15.9.0 or newer
- Visual Studio optional components
- Visual C++ compilers and libraries for ARM64
- Visual C++ ATL for ARM64
- Windows 10 SDK 10.0.17763.0 or newer
- ARM64 Windows build machine
If the path to your build directory contains a space or a non-ASCII character, the build will likely fail.
> .\vcbuild
To run the tests:
> .\vcbuild test
To test if Node.js was built correctly:
> Release\node -e "console.log('Hello from Node.js', process.version)"
Android is not a supported platform. Patches to improve the Android build are welcome. There is no testing on Android in the current continuous integration environment. The participation of people dedicated and determined to improve Android building, testing, and support is encouraged.
Be sure you have downloaded and extracted Android NDK before in a folder. Then run:
$ ./android-configure /path/to/your/android-ndk
$ make
Intl support is enabled by default, with English data only.
By default, only English data is included, but
the full Intl
(ECMA-402) APIs. It does not need to download
any dependencies to function. You can add full
data at runtime.
With the --download=all
, this may download ICU if you don't have an
ICU in deps/icu
. (The embedded small-icu
included in the default
Node.js source does not include all locales.)
$ ./configure --with-intl=full-icu --download=all
> .\vcbuild full-icu download-all
The Intl
object will not be available, nor some other APIs such as
String.normalize
.
$ ./configure --without-intl
> .\vcbuild without-intl
$ pkg-config --modversion icu-i18n && ./configure --with-intl=system-icu
If you are cross-compiling, your pkg-config
must be able to supply a path
that works for both your host and target environments.
You can find other ICU releases at
the ICU homepage.
Download the file named something like icu4c-**##.#**-src.tgz
(or
.zip
).
To check the minimum recommended ICU, run ./configure --help
and see
the help for the --with-icu-source
option. A warning will be printed
during configuration if the ICU version is too old.
From an already-unpacked ICU:
$ ./configure --with-intl=[small-icu,full-icu] --with-icu-source=/path/to/icu
From a local ICU tarball:
$ ./configure --with-intl=[small-icu,full-icu] --with-icu-source=/path/to/icu.tgz
From a tarball URL:
$ ./configure --with-intl=full-icu --with-icu-source=http://url/to/icu.tgz
First unpack latest ICU to deps/icu
icu4c-##.#-src.tgz (or .zip
)
as deps/icu
(You'll have: deps/icu/source/...
)
> .\vcbuild full-icu
This version of Node.js does not support FIPS.
It is possible to specify one or more JavaScript text files to be bundled in the binary as built-in modules when building Node.js.
This command will make /root/myModule.js
available via
require('/root/myModule')
and ./myModule2.js
available via
require('myModule2')
.
$ ./configure --link-module '/root/myModule.js' --link-module './myModule2.js'
To make ./myModule.js
available via require('myModule')
and
./myModule2.js
available via require('myModule2')
:
> .\vcbuild link-module './myModule.js' link-module './myModule2.js'
The Node.js ecosystem is reliant on ABI compatibility within a major
release. To maintain ABI compatibility it is required that production
builds of Node.js will be built against the same version of dependencies as the
project vendors. If Node.js is to be built against a different version of a
dependency please create a custom NODE_MODULE_VERSION
to ensure ecosystem
compatibility. Please consult with the TSC by opening an issue at
https://github.com/nodejs/tsc/issues if you decide to create a custom
NODE_MODULE_VERSION
so we can avoid duplication in the ecosystem.