Depending on what platform or features you require, the build process may differ slightly. After you've successfully built a binary, running the test suite to validate that the binary works as intended is a good next step.
If you can reproduce a test failure consistently, search for it in the Node.js issue tracker or file a new issue.
This list of supported platforms is current as of the branch/release to which it is attached.
Node.js relies on V8 and libuv. Therefore, we adopt a subset of their supported platforms.
Support is divided into three tiers:
- Tier 1: Full test coverage and maintenance by the Node.js core team and the broader community.
- Tier 2: Full test coverage but more limited maintenance, often provided by the vendor of the platform.
- Experimental: May not compile reliably or test suite may not pass. These are often working to be promoted to Tier 2 but are not quite ready. There is at least one individual actively providing maintenance and the team is striving to broaden quality and reliability of support.
The community does not build or test against end-of-life distributions (EoL). Thus, we do not recommend that you use Node on end-of-life or unsupported platforms in production.
System | Support type | Version | Architectures | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
GNU/Linux | Tier 1 | kernel >= 2.6.32, glibc >= 2.12 | x64, arm | |
GNU/Linux | Tier 1 | kernel >= 3.10, glibc >= 2.17 | arm64 | |
macOS/OS X | Tier 1 | >= 10.11 | x64 | |
Windows | Tier 1 | >= Windows 7/2008 R2/2012 R2 | x86, x64 | 2,3,4 |
SmartOS | Tier 2 | >= 15 < 16.4 | x86, x64 | 1 |
FreeBSD | Tier 2 | >= 10 | x64 | |
GNU/Linux | Tier 2 | kernel >= 3.13.0, glibc >= 2.19 | ppc64le >=power8 | |
AIX | Tier 2 | >= 7.1 TL04 | ppc64be >=power7 | |
GNU/Linux | Tier 2 | kernel >= 3.10, glibc >= 2.17 | s390x | |
GNU/Linux | Experimental | kernel >= 2.6.32, glibc >= 2.12 | x86 | limited CI |
Linux (musl) | Experimental | musl >= 1.0 | x64 |
1: The gcc4.8-libs package needs to be installed, because node binaries have been built with GCC 4.8, for which runtime libraries are not installed by default. For these node versions, the recommended binaries are the ones available in pkgsrc, not the one available from nodejs.org. Note that the binaries downloaded from the pkgsrc repositories are not officially supported by the Node.js project, and instead are supported by Joyent. SmartOS images >= 16.4 are not supported because GCC 4.8 runtime libraries are not available in their pkgsrc repository
2: Tier 1 support for building on Windows is only on 64 bit hosts. Support is experimental for 32 bit hosts.
3: On Windows, running Node.js in Windows terminal emulators
like mintty
requires the usage of winpty
for the tty channels to work correctly (e.g. winpty node.exe script.js
).
In "Git bash" if you call the node shell alias (node
without the .exe
extension), winpty
is used automatically.
4: The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is not directly
supported, but the GNU/Linux build process and binaries should work. The
community will only address issues that reproduce on native GNU/Linux
systems. Issues that only reproduce on WSL should be reported in the
WSL issue tracker. Running the
Windows binary (node.exe
) in WSL is not recommended, and will not work
without adjustment (such as stdio redirection).
Depending on host platform, the selection of toolchains may vary.
- GCC 4.9.4 or newer
- Clang 3.4.2 or newer
- GCC 6.3 or newer
- Visual Studio 2017 with the Windows 10 SDK on a 64 bit host.
OpenSSL-1.1.0 requires the following asssembler version for use of asm support on x86_64 and ia32.
- gas (GNU assembler) version 2.23 or higher
- xcode version 5.0 or higher
- llvm version 3.3 or higher
- nasm version 2.10 or higher in Windows
Otherwise configure
will fail with an error. This can be avoided by
either providing a newer assembler as per the list above or by
using the --openssl-no-asm
flag.
Note: The forthcoming OpenSSL-1.1.1 will require higher version. Please refer https://www.openssl.org/docs/man1.1.1/man3/OPENSSL_ia32cap.html for details.
Note: All prerequisites can be easily installed by following this bootstrapping guide.
gcc
andg++
4.9.4 or newer, orclang
andclang++
3.4.2 or newer (macOS: latest Xcode Command Line Tools)- Python 2.6 or 2.7
- GNU Make 3.81 or newer
On macOS, you will need to install the Xcode Command Line Tools
by running
xcode-select --install
. Alternatively, if you already have the full Xcode
installed, you can find them under the menu Xcode -> Open Developer Tool -> More Developer Tools...
. This step will install clang
, clang++
, and
make
.
If the path to your build directory contains a space, the build will likely fail.
After building, setting up firewall rules can avoid popups asking to accept incoming network connections when running tests.
Running the following script on macOS will add the firewall rules for the
executable node
in the out
directory and the symbolic node
link in the
project's root directory.
$ sudo ./tools/macos-firewall.sh
On FreeBSD and OpenBSD, you may also need:
- libexecinfo
To build Node.js:
$ ./configure
$ make -j4
Running make
with the -j4
flag will cause it to run 4 compilation jobs
concurrently which may significantly reduce build time. The number after -j
can be changed to best suit the number of processor cores on your machine. If
you run into problems running make
with concurrency, try running it without
the -j4
flag. See the
GNU Make Documentation
for more information.
Note that the above requires that python
resolve to Python 2.6 or 2.7
and not a newer version.
To verify the build:
$ make test-only
At this point, you are ready to make code changes and re-run the tests.
If you are running tests prior to submitting a Pull Request, the recommended command is:
$ make -j4 test
make -j4 test
does a full check on the codebase, including running linters and
documentation tests.
Optionally, continue below.
To run the tests and generate code coverage reports:
$ ./configure --coverage
$ make coverage
This will generate coverage reports for both JavaScript and C++ tests (if you
only want to run the JavaScript tests then you do not need to run the first
command ./configure --coverage
).
The make coverage
command downloads some tools to the project root directory
and overwrites the lib/
directory. To clean up after generating the coverage
reports:
$ make coverage-clean
To build the documentation:
This will build Node.js first (if necessary) and then use it to build the docs:
$ make doc
If you have an existing Node.js build, you can build just the docs with:
$ NODE=/path/to/node make doc-only
To read the documentation:
$ man doc/node.1
If you prefer to read the documentation in a browser,
run the following after make doc
is finished:
$ make docopen
This will open a browser with the documentation.
To test if Node.js was built correctly:
$ ./node -e "console.log('Hello from Node.js ' + process.version)"
To install this version of Node.js into a system directory:
$ [sudo] make install
Prerequisites:
- Python 2.6 or 2.7
- The "Desktop development with C++" workload from Visual Studio 2017 or the "Visual C++ build tools" workload from the Build Tools, with the default optional components.
- Basic Unix tools required for some tests,
Git for Windows includes Git Bash
and tools which can be included in the global
PATH
. - The NetWide Assembler, for OpenSSL assembler modules.
If not installed in the default location, it needs to be manually added
to
PATH
. Build withopenssl-no-asm
option does not require this. - Optional (to build the MSI): the WiX Toolset v3.11 and the Wix Toolset Visual Studio 2017 Extension.
If the path to your build directory contains a space or a non-ASCII character, the build will likely fail.
> .\vcbuild
To run the tests:
> .\vcbuild test
To test if Node.js was built correctly:
> Release\node -e "console.log('Hello from Node.js', process.version)"
Although these instructions for building on Android are provided, please note that Android is not an officially supported platform at this time. Patches to improve the Android build are accepted. However, there is no testing on Android in the current continuous integration environment. The participation of people dedicated and determined to improve Android building, testing, and support is encouraged.
Be sure you have downloaded and extracted Android NDK before in a folder. Then run:
$ ./android-configure /path/to/your/android-ndk
$ make
Intl support is enabled by default, with English data only.
By default, only English data is included, but
the full Intl
(ECMA-402) APIs. It does not need to download
any dependencies to function. You can add full
data at runtime.
With the --download=all
, this may download ICU if you don't have an
ICU in deps/icu
. (The embedded small-icu
included in the default
Node.js source does not include all locales.)
$ ./configure --with-intl=full-icu --download=all
> .\vcbuild full-icu download-all
The Intl
object will not be available, nor some other APIs such as
String.normalize
.
$ ./configure --without-intl
> .\vcbuild without-intl
$ pkg-config --modversion icu-i18n && ./configure --with-intl=system-icu
If you are cross compiling, your pkg-config
must be able to supply a path
that works for both your host and target environments.
You can find other ICU releases at
the ICU homepage.
Download the file named something like icu4c-**##.#**-src.tgz
(or
.zip
).
From an already-unpacked ICU:
$ ./configure --with-intl=[small-icu,full-icu] --with-icu-source=/path/to/icu
From a local ICU tarball:
$ ./configure --with-intl=[small-icu,full-icu] --with-icu-source=/path/to/icu.tgz
From a tarball URL:
$ ./configure --with-intl=full-icu --with-icu-source=http://url/to/icu.tgz
First unpack latest ICU to deps/icu
icu4c-##.#-src.tgz (or .zip
)
as deps/icu
(You'll have: deps/icu/source/...
)
> .\vcbuild full-icu
This version of Node.js does not support FIPS.
It is possible to specify one or more JavaScript text files to be bundled in the binary as builtin modules when building Node.js.
This command will make /root/myModule.js
available via
require('/root/myModule')
and ./myModule2.js
available via
require('myModule2')
.
$ ./configure --link-module '/root/myModule.js' --link-module './myModule2.js'
To make ./myModule.js
available via require('myModule')
and
./myModule2.js
available via require('myModule2')
:
> .\vcbuild link-module './myModule.js' link-module './myModule2.js'