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Building deno from Source

Below are instructions on how to build Deno from source. If you just want to use Deno you can download a prebuilt executable (more information in the Getting Started chapter).

Cloning the Repository​

Clone on Linux or Mac:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/denoland/deno.git

Extra steps for Windows users:

  1. Enable "Developer Mode" (otherwise symlinks would require administrator privileges).
  2. Make sure you are using git version 2.19.2.windows.1 or newer.
  3. Set core.symlinks=true before the checkout:
    git config --global core.symlinks true
    git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/denoland/deno.git

Prerequisites​

Deno requires the progressively latest stable release of Rust. Deno does not support the Rust Nightly Releases.

Update or Install Rust. Check that Rust installed/updated correctly:

rustc -V
cargo -V

For Apple aarch64 users lld must be installed.

brew install llvm
# Add /opt/homebrew/opt/llvm/bin/ to $PATH

Building Deno requires the Protocol Buffers compiler.

Linux, using apt or apt-get, for example:

apt install -y protobuf-compiler
protoc --version  # Ensure compiler version is 3+

MacOS, using Homebrew:

brew install protobuf
protoc --version  # Ensure compiler version is 3+

For Windows users, please download the latest release from GitHub

Building Deno​

The easiest way to build Deno is by using a precompiled version of V8:

cargo build -vv

However if you want to build Deno and V8 from source code:

V8_FROM_SOURCE=1 cargo build -vv

When building V8 from source, there are more dependencies:

Python 3 for running WPT tests. Ensure that a suffix-less python/python.exe exists in your PATH and it refers to Python 3.

For Linux users glib-2.0 development files must also be installed. (On Ubuntu, run apt install libglib2.0-dev.)

Mac users must have Command Line Tools installed. (XCode already includes CLT. Run xcode-select --install to install it without XCode.)

For Windows users:

  1. Get VS Community 2019 with "Desktop development with C++" toolkit and make sure to select the following required tools listed below along with all C++ tools.

    • Visual C++ tools for CMake
    • Windows 10 SDK (10.0.17763.0)
    • Testing tools core features - Build Tools
    • Visual C++ ATL for x86 and x64
    • Visual C++ MFC for x86 and x64
    • C++/CLI support
    • VC++ 2015.3 v14.00 (v140) toolset for desktop

  2. Enable "Debugging Tools for Windows". Go to "Control Panel" → "Programs" → "Programs and Features" → Select "Windows Software Development Kit - Windows 10" → "Change" → "Change" → Check "Debugging Tools For Windows" → "Change" → "Finish". Or use: Debugging Tools for Windows (Notice: it will download the files, you should install X64 Debuggers And Tools-x64_en-us.msi file manually.)

See rusty_v8's README for more details about the V8 build.

Building​

Build with Cargo:

# Build:
cargo build -vv

# Build errors?  Ensure you have latest main and try building again, or if that doesn't work try:
cargo clean && cargo build -vv

# Run:
./target/debug/deno run cli/tests/testdata/run/002_hello.ts