lighthouse/book/src/installation-source.md

Build from Source

Lighthouse builds on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Install the Dependencies using the instructions below, and then proceed to Building Lighthouse.

Dependencies

First, install Rust using rustup. The rustup installer provides an easy way to update the Rust compiler, and works on all platforms.

With Rust installed, follow the instructions below to install dependencies relevant to your operating system.

Ubuntu

Install the following packages:

sudo apt install -y git gcc g++ make cmake pkg-config llvm-dev libclang-dev clang protobuf-compiler

Note: Lighthouse requires CMake v3.12 or newer, which isn't available in the package repositories of Ubuntu 18.04 or earlier. On these distributions CMake can still be installed via PPA: https://apt.kitware.com/

macOS

1. Install the Homebrew package manager.
2. Install CMake using Homebrew:

brew install cmake

1. Install protoc using Homebrew:

brew install protobuf

Windows

1. Install Git.
2. Install the Chocolatey package manager for Windows.
3. Install Make, CMake, LLVM and protoc using Chocolatey:

choco install make

choco install cmake --installargs 'ADD_CMAKE_TO_PATH=System'

choco install llvm

choco install protoc

These dependencies are for compiling Lighthouse natively on Windows. Lighthouse can also run successfully under the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). If using Ubuntu under WSL, you should follow the instructions for Ubuntu listed in the Dependencies (Ubuntu) section.

Build Lighthouse

Once you have Rust and the build dependencies you're ready to build Lighthouse:

git clone https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse.git

cd lighthouse

git checkout stable

make

Compilation may take around 10 minutes. Installation was successful if lighthouse --help displays the command-line documentation.

If you run into any issues, please check the Troubleshooting section, or reach out to us on Discord.

Update Lighthouse

You can update Lighthouse to a specific version by running the commands below. The lighthouse directory will be the location you cloned Lighthouse to during the installation process. ${VERSION} will be the version you wish to build in the format vX.X.X.

cd lighthouse

git fetch

git checkout ${VERSION}

make

Feature Flags

You can customise the features that Lighthouse is built with using the FEATURES environment variable. E.g.

FEATURES=gnosis,slasher-lmdb make

Commonly used features include:

• gnosis: support for the Gnosis Beacon Chain.
• portable: support for legacy hardware.
• modern: support for exclusively modern hardware.
• slasher-mdbx: support for the MDBX slasher backend. Enabled by default.
• slasher-lmdb: support for the LMDB slasher backend.
• jemalloc: use jemalloc to allocate memory. Enabled by default on Linux and macOS. Not supported on Windows.

Compilation Profiles

You can customise the compiler settings used to compile Lighthouse via Cargo profiles.

Lighthouse includes several profiles which can be selected via the PROFILE environment variable.

• release: default for source builds, enables most optimisations while not taking too long to compile.
• maxperf: default for binary releases, enables aggressive optimisations including full LTO. Although compiling with this profile improves some benchmarks by around 20% compared to release, it imposes a significant cost at compile time and is only recommended if you have a fast CPU.

To compile with maxperf:

PROFILE=maxperf make

Troubleshooting

Command is not found

Lighthouse will be installed to CARGO_HOME or $HOME/.cargo. This directory needs to be on your PATH before you can run $ lighthouse.

See "Configuring the PATH environment variable" (rust-lang.org) for more information.

Compilation error

Make sure you are running the latest version of Rust. If you have installed Rust using rustup, simply type rustup update.

If you can't install the latest version of Rust you can instead compile using the Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV) which is listed under the rust-version key in Lighthouse's Cargo.toml.

If compilation fails with (signal: 9, SIGKILL: kill), this could mean your machine ran out of memory during compilation. If you are on a resource-constrained device you can look into cross compilation, or use a pre-built binary.

If compilation fails with error: linking with cc failed: exit code: 1, try running cargo clean.