construct/doc/BUILD.md

BUILD

Most users will need follow the standalone build instructions in the next section.

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

BUILD (standalone)

This section is intended to allow building with dependencies that have not made their way to mainstream systems. Important notes that may affect you:

• GCC: Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) users must use a PPA to obtain GCC-7 or greater; don't forget to export CXX=g++-7 before running ./configure on that system.

• Boost: The required version is available through apt as boost-all-dev on Ubuntu Cosmic (18.10). All earlier releases (including 18.04 LTS) can configure with --with-included-boost as instructed below.

• RocksDB: The required version is available through apt as librocksdb-dev on Ubuntu Disco (19.04). All earlier releases (including 18.04 LTS) can configure with --with-included-rocksdb as instructed below.

• RocksDB: At this time we advise all users including those on 19.04 to configure with --with-included-rocksdb until regressions in your RocksDB package have been fixed.

STANDALONE BUILD PROCEDURE

./autogen.sh
mkdir build

The install directory may be this or another place of your choosing. If you decide elsewhere, make sure to change the --prefix in the ./configure statement below.

./configure --prefix=$PWD/build --with-included-boost --with-included-rocksdb

The --with-included-* will fetch, configure and build the dependencies included as submodules.

make install

Installation Addendum

Additional build options

Development builds should follow the same instructions as the standalone section above while taking note of the following ./configure options:

Debug mode

--enable-debug

Full debug mode. Includes additional code within #ifdef RB_DEBUG sections. Optimization level is -Og, which is still valgrind-worthy. Debugger support is -ggdb. Log level is DEBUG (maximum). Assertions are enabled.

Release modes (for distribution packages)

Options in this section may help distribution maintainers create packages. Users building for themselves (whether standalone or fully installed) probably don't need anything here.

--enable-generic

Sets -mtune=generic as native is otherwise the default.

Compact mode

--enable-compact

Create the smallest possible resulting output. This will optimize for size (if optimization is enabled), remove all debugging, strip symbols, and apply any toolchain-feature or #ifdef in code that optimizes the output size.

This feature is experimental. It may not build or execute on all platforms reliably. Please report bugs.

Manually enable assertions

--enable-assert

Implied by --enable-debug. This is useful to specifically enable assert() statements when --enable-debug is not used.

Manually enable optimization

--enable-optimize

This manually applies full release-mode optimizations even when using --enable-debug. Implied when not in debug mode.

Disable third-party dynamic allocator libraries

--disable-alloc-libs

./configure will detect alternative malloc() implementations found in libraries installed on the system (jemalloc/tcmalloc/etc). Construct developers may enable these to be configured by default, if detected. To always prevent any alternative to the default standard library allocator specify this option.

Logging level

--with-log-level=

This manually sets the level of logging. All log levels at or below this level will be available. When a log level is not available, all code used to generate its messages will be entirely eliminated via dead-code-elimination at compile time.

The log levels are (from logger.h):

7  DEBUG      Maximum verbosity for developers.
6  DWARNING   A warning but only for developers (more frequent than WARNING).
5  DERROR     An error but only worthy of developers (more frequent than ERROR).
4  INFO       A more frequent message with good news.
3  NOTICE     An infrequent important message with neutral or positive news.
2  WARNING    Non-impacting undesirable behavior user should know about.
1  ERROR      Things that shouldn't happen; user impacted and should know.
0  CRITICAL   Catastrophic/unrecoverable; program is in a compromised state.

When --enable-debug is used --with-log-level=DEBUG is implied. Otherwise for release mode --with-log-level=INFO is implied. Large deployments with many users may consider lower than INFO to maximize optimization and reduce noise.