Skip to content

Alpine build guide

Instructions for alpine 3.13

Preparation

Minimal dependencies:

    apk add git boost-dev cmake libevent-dev openssl-dev build-base py-pip db-dev miniupnpc-dev libnatpmp-dev zeromq-dev help2man bash
    pip install ninja

NOTE: Since alpine 3.12, ninja was replaced with samurai, which is not fully compatible with the build system, hence the need for installing it with pip

You can do without the db-dev, miniupnpc-dev, libnatpmp-dev, zeromq-dev, and help2man & bash packages, then you just need to respectively pass -DBUILD_BITCOIN_WALLET=OFF, -DENABLE_UPNP=OFF, -DENABLE_NATPMP=OFF, -DBUILD_BITCOIN_ZMQ=OFF, or -DENABLE_MAN=OFF on the cmake command line.

If you want to build the GUI client bitcoin-qt Qt 5 is necessary. To build with Qt 5 you need the following packages installed:

apk add qt5-qtbase qt5-qttools-dev  libqrencode-dev

You can do without the libqrencode-dev package, just pass -DENABLE_QRCODE=OFF on the cmake command line.

Building

Once you have installed the required dependencies (see sections above), you can build Bitcoin Cash Node as such:

First fetch the code (if you haven't done so already).

git clone https://gitlab.com/bitcoin-cash-node/bitcoin-cash-node.git

Change to the BCN directory, make build dir, and change to that directory

cd bitcoin-cash-node/
mkdir build
cd build

Next you need to choose between building just the node, the node with wallet support, or the node and the QT client.

Choose one:

# to build just the node, no wallet functionality, choose this:
cmake -GNinja .. -DBUILD_BITCOIN_WALLET=OFF -DBUILD_BITCOIN_QT=OFF
# to build the node, with wallet functionality, but without GUI, choose this:
cmake -GNinja .. -DBUILD_BITCOIN_QT=OFF
# to build node and QT GUI client, choose this:
cmake -GNinja ..

Next, finish the build

ninja

You will find the bitcoind, bitcoin-cli, bitcoin-tx (and optionally bitcoin-qt) binaries in /build/src/(qt).

Optionally, run the tests

NOTE: As alpine is based on musl which doesn't have locales, in order to run tests one must follow an extra setup

export MUSL_LOCPATH=/usr/local/share/i18n/locales/musl
apk add --update git cmake make musl-dev gcc gettext-dev libintl
cd /tmp && git clone https://gitlab.com/rilian-la-te/musl-locales
cd /tmp/musl-locales && cmake . && make && make install && cd .. && rm -r musl-locales
# Go back to bitcoin-cash-node/build directory
# Test dependencies
apk add bash grep py-scipy
ninja check

After a successful test you can install the newly built binaries to your bin directory. Note that this will probably overwrite any previous version installed, including binaries from different sources.

sudo ninja install #optional