Building under Posix

Prerequisites

To build D on POSIX, you will need to have make, g++, libcurl4-openssl-dev, and git installed on your system, as well as a working GitHub account. To install the appropriate dependencies on e.g. Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install curl git make g++ libcurl4-openssl-dev

On OS X with Homebrew:

$ xcode-select --install
$ brew install git openssl

To build the 32-bit phobos on a 64-bit machine, some 32-bit packages are also needed:

sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib libc6-dev-i386 linux-libc-dev:i386 libcurl4-gnutls-dev:i386

Other versions and variations of libcurl may work as well.

Building D

Fetch repositories from GitHub =

Let's start by getting the current development (master) branch of the D repositories from GitHub. Assume the root directory for everything D-related is ~/dlang (replace appropriately). This is easily done by running at a command prompt:

cd ~/dlang
git clone https://github.com/dlang/dmd
git clone https://github.com/dlang/druntime
git clone https://github.com/dlang/phobos
git clone https://github.com/dlang/tools

After this step completes successfully, the ~/dlang should be up and filled with good stuff.

Bootstrap dmd

This step is interesting because in order to build dmd, dmd is necessary. Fortunately, the steps of downloading and using a preexisting dmd compiler are automated. All you need to do is run this command:

cd ~/dlang/dmd
make -f posix.mak -j8 AUTO_BOOTSTRAP=1

That's going to take a while. The build produces the compiler binary situated in an OS-dependent directory such as ~/dlang/dmd/generated/linux/release/64/dmd.

To make dmd builds faster in the future, you need to obviate the need for bootstrapping. Install dmd from the download page or simply put the freshly built dmd binary in a place accessible through $PATH (a popular choice is ~/bin).

Build phobos

Most D programs use D's standard library phobos. To build it, run:

cd ~/dlang/phobos
make -f posix.mak -j8

The build produces (with similar anticlimacticity) static and shared libraries such as ~/dlang/phobos/generated/linux/release/64/libphobos2.a and ~/code/phobos/generated/linux/release/64/libphobos2.so. As part of the build druntime will be built automatically, e.g. the generated druntime interfaces can be found at ~/dlang/druntime/import. The generated druntime libraries like ~/dlang/druntime/generated/linux/release/64/libdruntime.a get bundled with built phobos libraries.

Where to go from here

If you want to contribute to a D project, please continue with the starting as a contributor guide. If you want to contribute to Phobos, you may also read the contributing to Phobos guide.