Building The Library

This document describes how to build Botan on Unix/POSIX and Windows systems. The POSIX oriented descriptions should apply to most common Unix systems (including Apple macOS/Darwin), along with POSIX-ish systems like QNX.

Note

Botan is available already in nearly all packaging systems so you probably only need to build from source if you need unusual options or are building for an old system which has out of date packages.

Currently systems such as VMS, OS/390, and OS/400 are not supported by the build system, primarily due to lack of access and interest. Please contact the maintainer if you would like to build Botan on such a system.

Botan’s build is controlled by configure.py, which is a Python script. Python 3.x or later is required.

For the impatient, this works for most systems:

$ ./configure.py [--prefix=/some/directory]
$ make
$ make install

Or using nmake, if you’re compiling on Windows with Visual C++. On platforms that do not understand the ‘#!’ convention for beginning script files, or that have Python installed in an unusual spot, you might need to prefix the configure.py command with python3 or /path/to/python3:

$ python3 ./configure.py [arguments]

Configuring the Build

The first step is to run configure.py, which is a Python script that creates various directories, config files, and a Makefile for building everything. This script should run under a vanilla install of Python 3.x.

The script will attempt to guess what kind of system you are trying to compile for (and will print messages telling you what it guessed). You can override this process by passing the options --cc, --os, and --cpu.

You can pass basically anything reasonable with --cpu: the script knows about a large number of different architectures, their sub-models, and common aliases for them. You should only select the 64-bit version of a CPU (such as “sparc64” or “mips64”) if your operating system knows how to handle 64-bit object code - a 32-bit kernel on a 64-bit CPU will generally not like 64-bit code.

By default the script tries to figure out what will work on your system, and use that. It will print a display at the end showing which modules have and have not been enabled. For instance on one system we might see lines like:

INFO: Skipping (dependency failure): certstor_sqlite3 sessions_sqlite3
INFO: Skipping (incompatible CPU): aes_power8
INFO: Skipping (incompatible OS): darwin_secrandom getentropy win32_stats
INFO: Skipping (incompatible compiler): aes_armv8 pmull sha1_armv8 sha2_32_armv8
INFO: Skipping (no enabled compression schemes): compression
INFO: Skipping (requires external dependency): boost bzip2 lzma sqlite3 tpm zlib

The ones that are skipped because they are require an external dependency have to be explicitly asked for, because they rely on third party libraries which your system might not have or that you might not want the resulting binary to depend on. For instance to enable zlib support, add --with-zlib to your invocation of configure.py. All available modules can be listed with --list-modules.

Some modules may be marked as ‘deprecated’ or ‘experimental’. Deprecated modules are available and built by default, but they will be removed in a future release of the library. Use --disable-deprecated-features to disable all of these modules or --disable-modules=MODS for finer grained control. Experimental modules are under active development and not built by default. Their API may change in future minor releases. Applications may still enable and use such modules using --enable-modules=MODS or using --enable-experimental-features to enable all experimental features.

You can control which algorithms and modules are built using the options --enable-modules=MODS and --disable-modules=MODS, for instance --enable-modules=zlib and --disable-modules=xtea,idea. Modules not listed on the command line will simply be loaded if needed or if configured to load by default. If you use --minimized-build, only the most core modules will be included; you can then explicitly enable things that you want to use with --enable-modules. This is useful for creating a minimal build targeting to a specific application, especially in conjunction with the amalgamation option; see The Amalgamation Build and Minimized Builds.

For instance:

$ ./configure.py --minimized-build --enable-modules=rsa,eme_oaep,emsa_pssr

will set up a build that only includes RSA, OAEP, PSS along with any required dependencies. Note that a minimized build does not by default include any random number generator, which is needed for example to generate keys, nonces and IVs. See Random Number Generators on which random number generators are available.

Common Build Targets

Build everthing that is configured:

$ make all

Build the unit test binary (./botan-test to run):

$ make tests

Build and run the tests:

$ make check

Build the documentation (Doxygen API reference and Sphinx handbook):

$ make docs

Install the library:

$ make install

Remove all generated artefacts:

$ make clean

Cross Compiling

Cross compiling refers to building software on one type of host (say Linux x86-64) but creating a binary for some other type (say MinGW x86-32). This is completely supported by the build system. To extend the example, we must tell configure.py to use the MinGW tools:

$ ./configure.py --os=mingw --cpu=x86_32 --cc-bin=i686-w64-mingw32-g++ --ar-command=i686-w64-mingw32-ar
...
$ make
...
$ file botan.exe
botan.exe: PE32 executable (console) Intel 80386, for MS Windows

Note

For whatever reason, some distributions of MinGW lack support for threading or mutexes in the C++ standard library. You can work around this by disabling thread support using --without-os-feature=threads

You can also specify the alternate tools by setting the CXX and AR environment variables (instead of the –cc-bin and –ar-command options), as is commonly done with autoconf builds.

On Unix

The basic build procedure on Unix and Unix-like systems is:

$ ./configure.py [various options]
$ make
$ make check

If the tests look OK, install:

$ make install

On Unix systems the script will default to using GCC; use --cc if you want something else. For instance use --cc=clang for Clang.

The make install target has a default directory in which it will install Botan (typically /usr/local). You can override this by using the --prefix argument to configure.py, like so:

$ ./configure.py --prefix=/opt <other arguments>

On some systems shared libraries might not be immediately visible to the runtime linker. For example, on Linux you may have to edit /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig (as root) in order for new shared libraries to be picked up by the linker. An alternative is to set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH shell variable to include the directory that the Botan libraries were installed into.

On macOS

A build on macOS works much like that on any other Unix-like system.

To build a universal binary for macOS, for older macOs releases, you need to set some additional build flags. Do this with the configure.py flag –cc-abi-flags:

--cc-abi-flags="-force_cpusubtype_ALL -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -arch i386 -arch ppc"

for mac M1 on arm64, you can build the x86_64 arch version via Rosetta separately. Do this with with arch -x86_64 configure.py –library-suffix=-x86_64 Then using lipo to create a fat binary. lipo -create libbotan-arm64.dylib libbotan-x86_64.dylib -o libbotan.dylib

On Windows

Note

The earliest versions of Windows supported are Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2

You need to have a copy of Python installed, and have both Python and your chosen compiler in your path. Open a command shell (or the SDK shell), and run:

$ python3 configure.py --cc=msvc --os=windows
$ nmake
$ nmake check
$ nmake install

Micosoft’s nmake does not support building multiple jobs in parallel, which is unfortunate when building on modern multicore machines. It is possible to use the (somewhat unmaintained) Jom build tool, which is a nmake compatible build system that supports parallel builds. Alternately, starting in Botan 3.2, there is additionally support for using the ninja build tool as an alternative to nmake:

$ python3 configure.py --cc=msvc --os=windows --build-tool=ninja
$ ninja
$ ninja check
$ ninja install

For MinGW, use:

$ python3 configure.py --cc=gcc --os=mingw
$ make

By default the install target will be C:\botan; you can modify this with the --prefix option.

When building your applications, all you have to do is tell the compiler to look for both include files and library files in C:\botan, and it will find both. Or you can move them to a place where they will be in the default compiler search paths (consult your documentation and/or local expert for details).

Ninja Support

Starting in Botan 3.2, there is additionally support for the ninja build system.

This is particularly useful on Windows as there the default build tool nmake does not support parallel jobs. The ninja based build also works on Unix and macOs systems.

Support for ninja is still new and there are probably some rough edges.

For iOS using XCode

For iOS, you typically build for 3 architectures: armv7 (32 bit, older iOS devices), armv8-a (64 bit, recent iOS devices) and x86_64 for the iPhone simulator. You can build for these 3 architectures and then create a universal binary containing code for all of these architectures, so you can link to Botan for the simulator as well as for an iOS device.

To cross compile for armv7, configure and make with:

$ ./configure.py --os=ios --prefix="iphone-32" --cpu=armv7 --cc=clang \
                 --cc-abi-flags="-arch armv7"
$ xcrun --sdk iphoneos make install

To cross compile for armv8-a, configure and make with:

$ ./configure.py --os=ios --prefix="iphone-64" --cpu=armv8-a --cc=clang \
                 --cc-abi-flags="-arch arm64"
$ xcrun --sdk iphoneos make install

To compile for the iPhone Simulator, configure and make with:

$ ./configure.py --os=ios --prefix="iphone-simulator" --cpu=x86_64 --cc=clang \
                 --cc-abi-flags="-arch x86_64"
$ xcrun --sdk iphonesimulator make install

Now create the universal binary and confirm the library is compiled for all three architectures:

$ xcrun --sdk iphoneos lipo -create -output libbotan-2.a \
               iphone-32/lib/libbotan-2.a \
               iphone-64/lib/libbotan-2.a \
               iphone-simulator/lib/libbotan-2.a
$ xcrun --sdk iphoneos lipo -info libbotan-2.a
Architectures in the fat file: libbotan-2.a are: armv7 x86_64 armv64

The resulting static library can be linked to your app in Xcode.

For Android

Modern versions of Android NDK use Clang and support C++20. Simply configure using the appropriate NDK compiler and ar (ar only needed if building the static library). Here we build for Aarch64 targeting Android API 28:

$ export AR=/opt/android-ndk/toolchains/llvm/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/llvm-ar
$ export CXX=/opt/android-ndk/toolchains/llvm/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/aarch64-linux-android28-clang++
$ ./configure.py --os=android --cc=clang --cpu=arm64
$ make

If you are building for mobile development consider restricting the build to only what you need (see Minimized Builds)

Docker

To build android version, there is the possibility to use the docker way:

sudo ANDROID_SDK_VER=29 ANDROID_ARCH=aarch64 src/scripts/docker-android.sh

This will produce the docker-builds/android folder containing each architecture compiled.

Emscripten (WebAssembly)

To build for WebAssembly using Emscripten, try:

./configure.py --cpu=wasm --os=emscripten
make

This will produce HTML files botan-test.html and botan.html along with a static archive libbotan-3.a which can be linked with other modules.

Supporting Older Distros

Some “stable” distributions, notably RHEL/CentOS, ship very obsolete versions of binutils, which do not support more recent CPU instructions. As a result when building you may receive errors like:

Error: no such instruction: `sha256rnds2 %xmm0,%xmm4,%xmm3'

Depending on how old your binutils is, you may need to disable BMI2, AVX2, SHA-NI, and/or RDSEED. These can be disabled by passing the flags --disable-bmi2, --disable-avx2, --disable-sha-ni, and --disable-rdseed to configure.py.

Building Applications

Unix

Botan usually links in several different system libraries (such as librt or libz), depending on which modules are configured at compile time. In many environments, particularly ones using static libraries, an application has to link against the same libraries as Botan for the linking step to succeed. But how does it figure out what libraries it is linked against?

The answer is to ask the botan command line tool using the config and version commands.

botan version: Print the Botan version number.

botan config prefix: If no argument, print the prefix where Botan is installed (such as /opt or /usr/local).

botan config cflags: Print options that should be passed to the compiler whenever a C++ file is compiled. Typically this is used for setting include paths.

botan config libs: Print options for which libraries to link to (this will include a reference to the botan library itself).

Your Makefile can run botan config and get the options necessary for getting your application to compile and link, regardless of whatever crazy libraries Botan might be linked against.

Windows

No special help exists for building applications on Windows. However, given that typically Windows software is distributed as binaries, this is less of a problem - only the developer needs to worry about it. As long as they can remember where they installed Botan, they just have to set the appropriate flags in their Makefile/project file.

CMake

Starting in Botan 3.3.0 we provide a botan-config.cmake module to discover the installed library binaries and headers. This hooks into CMake’s find_package() and comes with common features like version detection. Also, library consumers may specify which botan modules they require in find_package().

Examples:

find_package(Botan 3.3.0)
find_package(Botan 3.3.0 COMPONENTS rsa ecdsa tls13)
find_package(Botan 3.3.0 OPTIONAL_COMPONENTS tls13_pqc)

Language Wrappers

Building the Python wrappers

The Python wrappers for Botan use ctypes and the C89 API so no special build step is required, just import botan3.py

See Python Bindings for more information about the Python bindings.

Minimized Builds

Many developers wish to configure a minimized build which contains only the specific features their application will use. In general this is straighforward: use --minimized-build plus --enable-modules= to enable the specific modules you wish to use. Any such configurations should build and pass the tests; if you encounter a case where it doesn’t please file an issue.

The only trick is knowing which features you want to enable. The most common difficulty comes with entropy sources. By default, none are enabled, which means if you attempt to use AutoSeeded_RNG, it will fail. The easiest resolution is to also enable system_rng which can act as either an entropy source or used directly as the RNG.

If you are building for x86, ARM, or POWER, it can be beneficial to enable hardware support for the relevant instruction sets with modules such as aes_ni and clmul for x86, or aes_armv8, pmull, and sha2_32_armv8 on ARMv8. SIMD optimizations such as chacha_avx2 also can provide substantial performance improvements.

Note

In a future release, hardware specific modules will be enabled by default if the underlying “base” module is enabled.

If you are building a TLS application, you may (or may not) want to include tls_cbc which enables support for CBC ciphersuites. If tls_cbc is disabled, then it will not be possible to negotiate TLS v1.0/v1.1. In general this should be considered a feature; only enable this if you need backward compatability with obsolete clients or servers.

For TLS another useful feature which is not enabled by default is the ChaCha20Poly1305 ciphersuites. To enable these, add chacha20poly1305.

Configure Script Options

--cpu=CPU

Set the target CPU architecture. If not used, the arch of the current system is detected (using Python’s platform module) and used.

--os=OS

Set the target operating system.

--cc=COMPILER

Set the desired build compiler

--cc-min-version=MAJOR.MINOR

Set the minimal version of the target compiler. Use –cc-min-version=0.0 to support all compiler versions. Default is auto detection.

--cc-bin=BINARY

Set path to compiler binary

If not provided, the value of the CXX environment variable is used if set.

--cc-abi-flags=FLAGS

Set ABI flags, which for the purposes of this option mean options which should be passed to both the compiler and linker.

--cxxflags=FLAGS

Override all compiler flags. This is equivalent to setting CXXFLAGS in the environment.

--extra-cxxflags=FLAGS

Set extra compiler flags, which are appended to the default set. This is useful if you want to set just one or two additional options but leave the normal logic for selecting flags alone.

--ldflags=FLAGS

Set flags to pass to the linker. This is equivalent to setting LDFLAGS

--ar-command=AR

Set the path to the tool to use to create static archives (ar). This is normally only used for cross-compilation.

If not provided, the value of the AR environment variable is used if set.

--ar-options=AR_OPTIONS

Specify the options to pass to ar.

If not provided, the value of the AR_OPTIONS environment variable is used if set.

--msvc-runtime=RT

Specify the MSVC runtime to use (MT, MD, MTd, or MDd). If not specified, picks either MD or MDd depending on if debug mode is set.

--compiler-cache

Specify a compiler cache (like ccache) to use for each compiler invocation.

--with-endian=ORDER

The parameter should be either “little” or “big”. If not used then if the target architecture has a default, that is used. Otherwise left unspecified, which causes less optimal codepaths to be used but will work on either little or big endian.

--with-os-features=FEAT

Specify an OS feature to enable. See src/build-data/os and doc/os.rst for more information.

--without-os-features=FEAT

Specify an OS feature to disable.

--enable-experimental-features

Enable all experimental modules and features. Note that these are unstable and may change or even be removed in future releases. Also note that individual experimental modules can be explicitly enabled using --enable-modules=MODS.

--disable-experimental-features

Disable all experimental modules and features. This is the default.

--enable-deprecated-features

Enable all deprecated modules and features. Note that these are scheduled for removal in future releases. This is the default.

--disable-deprecated-features

Disable all deprecated modules and features. Note that individual deprecated modules can be explicitly disabled using --disable-modules=MODS.

--disable-sse2

Disable use of SSE2 intrinsics

--disable-ssse3

Disable use of SSSE3 intrinsics

--disable-sse4.1

Disable use of SSE4.1 intrinsics

--disable-sse4.2

Disable use of SSE4.2 intrinsics

--disable-avx2

Disable use of AVX2 intrinsics

--disable-bmi2

Disable use of BMI2 intrinsics

--disable-rdrand

Disable use of RDRAND intrinsics

--disable-rdseed

Disable use of RDSEED intrinsics

--disable-aes-ni

Disable use of AES-NI intrinsics

--disable-sha-ni

Disable use of SHA-NI intrinsics

--disable-altivec

Disable use of AltiVec intrinsics

--disable-neon

Disable use of NEON intrinsics

--disable-armv8crypto

Disable use of ARMv8 Crypto intrinsics

--disable-powercrypto

Disable use of POWER Crypto intrinsics

--system-cert-bundle=PATH

Set a path to a file containing one or more trusted CA certificates in PEM format. If not given, some default locations are checked.

--with-debug-info

Include debug symbols.

--with-sanitizers

Enable some default set of sanitizer checks. What exactly is enabled depends on the compiler.

--enable-sanitizers=SAN

Enable specific sanitizers. See src/build-data/cc for more information.

--without-stack-protector

Disable stack smashing protections. not recommended

--with-coverage-info

Add coverage info

--disable-shared-library

Disable building a shared library

--disable-static-library

Disable building static library

--optimize-for-size

Optimize for code size.

--no-optimizations

Disable all optimizations for debugging.

--debug-mode

Enable debug info and disable optimizations

--amalgamation

Use amalgamation to build

--name-amalgamation

Specify an alternative amalgamation file name. By default we use botan_all.

--with-build-dir=DIR

Setup the build in a specified directory instead of ./build

--with-external-includedir=DIR

Search for includes in this directory. Provide this parameter multiple times to define multiple additional include directories.

--with-external-libdir=DIR

Add DIR to the link path. Provide this parameter multiple times to define multiple additional library link directories.

--define-build-macro

Set a compile-time pre-processor definition (i.e. add a -D… to the compiler invocations). Provide this parameter multiple times to add multiple compile-time definitions. Both KEY=VALUE and KEY (without specific value) are supported.

--with-sysroot-dir=DIR

Use specified dir for system root while cross-compiling

--with-local-config=FILE

Include the contents of FILE into the generated build.h

--distribution-info=STRING

Set distribution specific version information

--maintainer-mode

A build configuration used by library developers, which enables extra warnings and turns most warnings into errors.

Warning

When this option is used, all relevant warnings available in the most recent release of GCC/Clang are enabled, so it may fail to build if your compiler is not sufficiently recent. In addition there may be non-default configurations or unusual platforms which cause warnings which are converted to errors. Patches addressing such warnings are welcome, but otherwise no support is available when using this option.

--werror-mode

Turns most warnings into errors.

--no-install-python-module

Skip installing Python module.

--with-python-versions=N.M

Where to install botan3.py. By default this is chosen to be the version of Python that is running configure.py.

--with-valgrind

Use valgrind API to perform additional checks. Not needed by end users.

--unsafe-fuzzer-mode

Disable essential checks for testing. UNSAFE FOR PRODUCTION

--build-fuzzers=TYPE

Select which interface the fuzzer uses. Options are “afl”, “libfuzzer”, “klee”, or “test”. The “test” mode builds fuzzers that read one input from stdin and then exit.

--with-fuzzer-lib=LIB

Specify an additional library that fuzzer binaries must link with.

--build-targets=BUILD_TARGETS

Build only the specific targets and tools (static, shared, cli, tests, bogo_shim).

--without-documentation

Skip building/installing documentation

--with-sphinx

Use Sphinx to generate the handbook

--with-pdf

Use Sphinx to generate PDF doc

--with-rst2man

Use rst2man to generate a man page for the CLI

--with-doxygen

Use Doxygen to generate API reference

--module-policy=POL

The option --module-policy=POL enables modules required by and disables modules prohibited by a text policy in src/build-data/policy. Additional modules can be enabled if not prohibited by the policy. Currently available policies include bsi, nist and modern:

$ ./configure.py --module-policy=bsi --enable-modules=tls,xts

--enable-modules=MODS

Enable some specific modules

--disable-modules=MODS

Disable some specific modules

--minimized-build

Start with the bare minimum. This is mostly useful in conjuction with --enable-modules to get a build that has just the features a particular application requires.

--with-boost

Use Boost.Asio for networking support. This primarily affects the command line utils.

--with-bzip2

Enable bzip2 compression

--with-lzma

Enable lzma compression

--with-zlib

Enable using zlib compression

--with-commoncrypto

Enable using CommonCrypto for certain operations

--with-sqlite3

Enable using sqlite3 for data storage

--with-tpm

Enable support for TPM 1.2

--with-tpm2

Enable support for TPM 2.0

--program-suffix=SUFFIX

A string to append to all program binaries.

--library-suffix=SUFFIX

A string to append to all library names.

--prefix=DIR

Set the install prefix.

--docdir=DIR

Set the documentation installation dir.

--bindir=DIR

Set the binary installation dir.

--libdir=DIR

Set the library installation dir.

--mandir=DIR

Set the man page installation dir.

--includedir=DIR

Set the include file installation dir.

--list-modules

List all modules that could be enabled or disabled using –enable-modules or –disable-modules.