// how to run make correctly to get a good build, and otherwise understand the build system
extending yourself with a new reusable skill by interviewing the user
analyzing a change to determine what tests are needed and adding them to the test suite
modifying build configuration to enable/disable variants, switch compilers or flags, or otherwise prepare for a build
reviewing a change for semantic correctness, simplicity, design consistency, and completeness
reviewing a git diff for small localized coding mistakes that can be fixed without high-level understanding
running tests at various levels from smoke tests to full suite to randomized tests
| name | running-make-to-build |
| description | how to run make correctly to get a good build, and otherwise understand the build system |
The build is a recursive make structure, with several projects vendored in to
lib that use their own Makefiles and also one primary src/Makefile.am that
defines most of the build.
make -j $(nproc) to get full parallelism2>&1 | tail -N to limit outputgit add <somefile> && ./make-mks after adding <somefile> to
ensure it is included in the build.make -C <somedir> for any other directorycargo manually, let make run itMakefile or Makefile.in, only ever edit Makefile.amThe main targets are:
all -- the implicit target, builds src/stellar-corecheck -- builds all then runs unit and integration testsclean -- removes build artifactsformat -- auto-formats source code with standard rulesIf anything goes wrong or is confusing in the build, start by running make clean and trying again. You should have configured with --enable-ccache which
means that rebuilding will typically be very cheap. Especially if you run with
make -j $(nproc)
The src/Makefile.am also delegates to cargo to build the rust components
of stellar-core in src/rust as well as all the submodules in src/rust/soroban.
The integration is quite subtle. You should always let src/Makefile.am handle
invoking cargo.
Several source files are generated. All .x files in src/protocol-{curr,next}
are turned into .cpp and .h files by the xdrpp code-generator in lib/xdrpp.
Parts of the XDR query system in src/util/xdrquery are built by flex and
bison.
Files like src/main/StellarCoreVersion.cpp bake the current version
information into a string constant in stellar-core.
And finally the rust bridge src/rust/RustBridge.{cpp,h} is generated by the
cxxbridge tool from src/rust/bridge.rs.
Most of the time you won't need to edit Makefile.am or src/Makefile.am at all.
Files included in the build are driven by the script ./make-mks which
lists files tracked by git and defines makefile variables based on them.
As soon as you add a .cpp or .h file to git and re-run ./make-mks
it will be added to the build.