Note: This document describes building Rust from source. This is not recommended if you don't know what you're doing. If you just want to install Rust, check out the README.md instead.
The Rust build system uses a Python script called x.py
to build the compiler,
which manages the bootstrapping process. It lives at the root of the project.
It also uses a file named config.toml
to determine various configuration
settings for the build. You can see a full list of options in
config.example.toml
.
The x.py
command can be run directly on most Unix systems in the following
format:
./x.py <subcommand> [flags]
This is how the documentation and examples assume you are running x.py
.
See the rustc dev guide if this does not work on your
platform.
More information about x.py
can be found by running it with the --help
flag
or reading the rustc dev guide.
Make sure you have installed the dependencies:
python
3 or 2.7git
- A C compiler (when building for the host,
cc
is enough; cross-compiling may need additional compilers) curl
(not needed on Windows)pkg-config
if you are compiling on Linux and targeting Linuxlibiconv
(already included with glibc on Debian-based distros)
To build Cargo, you'll also need OpenSSL (libssl-dev
or openssl-devel
on
most Unix distros).
If building LLVM from source, you'll need additional tools:
g++
,clang++
, or MSVC with versions listed on LLVM's documentationninja
, or GNUmake
3.81 or later (Ninja is recommended, especially on Windows)cmake
version listed on LLVM's documentationlibstdc++-static
may be required on some Linux distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu
On tier 1 or tier 2 with host tools platforms, you can also choose to download
LLVM by setting llvm.download-ci-llvm = true
.
Otherwise, you'll need LLVM installed and llvm-config
in your path.
See the rustc-dev-guide for more info.
-
Clone the source with
git
:git clone https://github.com/rust-lang/rust.git cd rust
-
Configure the build settings:
./configure
If you plan to use
x.py install
to create an installation, it is recommended that you set theprefix
value in the[install]
section to a directory:./configure --set install.prefix=<path>
-
Build and install:
./x.py build && ./x.py install
When complete,
./x.py install
will place several programs into$PREFIX/bin
:rustc
, the Rust compiler, andrustdoc
, the API-documentation tool. By default, it will also include Cargo, Rust's package manager. You can disable this behavior by passing--set build.extended=false
to./configure
.
This project provides a configure script and makefile (the latter of which just
invokes x.py
). ./configure
is the recommended way to programmatically
generate a config.toml
. make
is not recommended (we suggest using x.py
directly), but it is supported and we try not to break it unnecessarily.
./configure
make && sudo make install
configure
generates a config.toml
which can also be used with normal x.py
invocations.
On Windows, we suggest using winget to install dependencies by running the following in a terminal:
winget install -e Python.Python.3
winget install -e Kitware.CMake
winget install -e Git.Git
Then edit your system's PATH
variable and add: C:\Program Files\CMake\bin
.
See
this guide on editing the system PATH
from the Java documentation.
There are two prominent ABIs in use on Windows: the native (MSVC) ABI used by Visual Studio and the GNU ABI used by the GCC toolchain. Which version of Rust you need depends largely on what C/C++ libraries you want to interoperate with. Use the MSVC build of Rust to interop with software produced by Visual Studio and the GNU build to interop with GNU software built using the MinGW/MSYS2 toolchain.
MSYS2 can be used to easily build Rust on Windows:
-
Download the latest MSYS2 installer and go through the installer.
-
Download and install Git for Windows. Make sure that it's in your Windows PATH. To enable access to it from within MSYS2, edit the relevant
mingw[32|64].ini
file in your MSYS2 installation directory and uncomment the lineMSYS2_PATH_TYPE=inherit
.You could install and use MSYS2's version of git instead with
pacman
, however this is not recommended as it's excruciatingly slow, and not frequently tested for compatibility. -
Start a MINGW64 or MINGW32 shell (depending on whether you want 32-bit or 64-bit Rust) either from your start menu, or by running
mingw64.exe
ormingw32.exe
from your MSYS2 installation directory (e.g.C:\msys64
). -
From this terminal, install the required tools:
# Update package mirrors (may be needed if you have a fresh install of MSYS2) pacman -Sy pacman-mirrors # Install build tools needed for Rust. If you're building a 32-bit compiler, # then replace "x86_64" below with "i686". # Note that it is important that you do **not** use the 'python2', 'cmake', # and 'ninja' packages from the 'msys2' subsystem. # The build has historically been known to fail with these packages. pacman -S make \ diffutils \ tar \ mingw-w64-x86_64-python \ mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake \ mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc \ mingw-w64-x86_64-ninja
-
Navigate to Rust's source code (or clone it), then build it:
python x.py setup dist && python x.py build && python x.py install
If you want to try the native Windows versions of Python or CMake, you can remove them from the above pacman command and install them from another source. Follow the instructions in step 2 to get them on PATH.
Using Windows native Python can be helpful if you get errors when building LLVM. You may also want to use Git for Windows, as it is often much faster. Turning off real-time protection in the Windows Virus & Threat protections settings can also help with long run times (although note that it will automatically turn itself back on after some time).
MSVC builds of Rust additionally require an installation of Visual Studio 2017
(or later) so rustc
can use its linker. The simplest way is to get
Visual Studio, check the "C++ build tools" and "Windows 10 SDK" workload.
(If you're installing CMake yourself, be careful that "C++ CMake tools for Windows" doesn't get included under "Individual components".)
With these dependencies installed, you can build the compiler in a cmd.exe
shell with:
python x.py setup user
python x.py build
Right now, building Rust only works with some known versions of Visual Studio. If you have a more recent version installed and the build system doesn't understand, you may need to force bootstrap to use an older version. This can be done by manually calling the appropriate vcvars file before running the bootstrap.
CALL "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat"
python x.py build
Each specific ABI can also be used from either environment (for example, using the GNU ABI in PowerShell) by using an explicit build triple. The available Windows build triples are:
- GNU ABI (using GCC)
i686-pc-windows-gnu
x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
- The MSVC ABI
i686-pc-windows-msvc
x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
The build triple can be specified by either specifying --build=<triple>
when
invoking x.py
commands, or by creating a config.toml
file (as described in
Building on a Unix-like system), and passing
--set build.build=<triple>
to ./configure
.
If you'd like to build the documentation, it's almost the same:
./x.py doc
The generated documentation will appear under doc
in the build
directory for
the ABI used. That is, if the ABI was x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
, the directory
will be build\x86_64-pc-windows-msvc\doc
.
Since the Rust compiler is written in Rust, it must be built by a precompiled "snapshot" version of itself (made in an earlier stage of development). As such, source builds require an Internet connection to fetch snapshots, and an OS that can execute the available snapshot binaries.
See https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.html for a list of supported platforms. Only "host tools" platforms have a pre-compiled snapshot binary available; to compile for a platform without host tools you must cross-compile.
You may find that other platforms work, but these are our officially supported build environments that are most likely to work.