Unix Build of Dogecoin Core

This installation guide serves as a basis for all UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. All examples in this guide are illustrated using an Ubuntu/Debian OS, and guides for different OSs can be found in separate documentation, as listed below.

  1. Install dependencies
  2. Build steps
  3. Build configuration
  4. ARM Cross-compilation
  5. OS-specific documentation:

Install dependencies

You must install required dependencies to build a basic Dogecoin daemon, optional dependencies may vary according to your requirements.

Wallet is optional to run a node, see Wallet section to enable them.

Required dependencies :

LibraryPurposeDescription
libsslCryptoRandom Number Generation, Elliptic Curve Cryptography
libboostUtilityLibrary for threading, data structures, etc
libeventNetworkingOS independent asynchronous networking

Optional dependencies:

LibraryPurposeDescription
miniupnpcUPnP SupportFirewall-jumping support
libdb5.3Berkeley DBWallet storage (only needed when wallet enabled)
qtGUIGUI toolkit (only needed when GUI enabled)
protobufPayments in GUIData interchange format used for payment protocol (only needed when GUI enabled)
libqrencodeQR codes in GUIOptional for generating QR codes (only needed when GUI enabled)
univalueUtilityJSON parsing and encoding (bundled version will be used unless --with-system-univalue passed to configure)
libzmq3ZMQ notificationOptional, allows generating ZMQ notifications (requires ZMQ version >= 4.x)

For the versions used in the release, see release-process.md under Fetch and build inputs.

Using packaged dependencies

Dogecoin Core's released binaries are built using the "depends system", which contains exact, tested versions of all dependencies. To create binaries that are using only fully tested dependencies, see the documentation in the depends directory and the Release process documentation.

Ubuntu & Debian example

Before installing the dependencies, ensure your system is updated and has the latest security patches:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Required dependencies :

sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool autotools-dev automake pkg-config libssl-dev libevent-dev bsdmainutils
sudo apt-get install libboost-system-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-chrono-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-test-dev libboost-thread-dev

Optional dependencies :

# Qt (required for dogecoin-qt GUI)
sudo apt-get install libqt5gui5 libqt5core5a libqt5dbus5 qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler libqrencode-dev

# BerkeleyDB (version 5.3)
sudo apt install libdb5.3++-dev libdb5.3++ libdb5.3-dev

# ZMQ (provides ZMQ API 4.x)
sudo apt-get install libzmq3-dev

# Miniupnpc
sudo apt-get install libminiupnpc-dev

Build steps

According to installed dependencies, the following steps will compile dogecoind, dogecoin-cli and dogecoin-qt.

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install # optional

See Build configuration for extra settings.

Build configuration

Configurations are done during the ./configure step. Use --help to see all available options.

Enable Qt GUI

Create dogecoin-qt, the core wallet GUI.

./configure --with-gui

Wallet

BerkeleyDB is required for wallet functionality and use of the wallet.dat file.

By default, Dogecoin Core expects BerkeleyDB 5.3. You can use a different version by specifying --with-incompatible-bdb flag.

If you have to build it yourself, you can use the installation script included in contrib/ like so:

./contrib/install_db5.sh `pwd`

from the root of the repository.

Otherwise, you can build Dogecoin Core from self-compiled depends.

Note: You only need Berkeley DB if the wallet is enabled (see Disable-wallet mode).

Disable-wallet mode

When the intention is to run only a P2P node without a wallet, Dogecoin may be compiled in disable-wallet mode with:

./configure --disable-wallet

Mining is also possible in disable-wallet mode, but only using the getblocktemplate RPC call, not getwork.

Miniupnpc

miniupnpc may be used for UPnP port mapping. It can be downloaded from here. UPnP support is compiled in and turned off by default. See the configure options for upnp behavior desired:

--without-miniupnpc      #No UPnP support miniupnp not required
--disable-upnp-default   #(the default) UPnP support turned off by default at runtime
--enable-upnp-default    #UPnP support turned on by default at runtime

Security

To help make your Dogecoin installation more secure by making certain attacks impossible to exploit even if a vulnerability is found, binaries are hardened by default. This can be disabled with:

Hardening Flags:

./configure --enable-hardening
./configure --disable-hardening

Hardening enables the following features:

  • Position Independent Executable Build position independent code to take advantage of Address Space Layout Randomization offered by some kernels. Attackers who can cause execution of code at an arbitrary memory location are thwarted if they don't know where anything useful is located. The stack and heap are randomly located by default but this allows the code section to be randomly located as well.

    On an AMD64 processor where a library was not compiled with -fPIC, this will cause an error such as: relocation R_X86_64_32 against '......' can not be used when making a shared object;

    To test that you have built PIE executable, install scanelf, part of paxutils, and use:

    scanelf -e ./dogecoin

    The output should contain:

    TYPE ET_DYN

  • Non-executable Stack If the stack is executable, trivial stack-based buffer overflow exploits are possible if vulnerable buffers are found. By default, Dogecoin should be built with a non-executable stack, but if one of the libraries it uses asks for an executable stack or someone makes a mistake and uses a compiler extension which requires an executable stack, it will silently build an executable without the non-executable stack protection.

    To verify that the stack is non-executable after compiling, use: scanelf -e ./dogecoin

    the output should contain: STK/REL/PTL RW- R-- RW-

    The STK RW- means that the stack is readable and writeable, but not executable.

Memory Requirements

C++ compilers are memory-hungry. It is recommended to have at least 1.5 GB of memory available when compiling Dogecoin Core. On systems with less, gcc can be tuned to conserve memory with additional CXXFLAGS:

./configure CXXFLAGS="--param ggc-min-expand=1 --param ggc-min-heapsize=32768"

ARM Cross-compilation

These steps can be performed on, for example, an Ubuntu VM. The depends system will also work on other Linux distributions, however the commands for installing the toolchain will be different.

Make sure you install the build requirements mentioned above. Then, install the toolchain and curl:

sudo apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf curl

To build executables for ARM:

cd depends
make HOST=arm-linux-gnueabihf NO_QT=1
cd ..
./configure --prefix=$PWD/depends/arm-linux-gnueabihf --enable-glibc-back-compat --enable-reduce-exports LDFLAGS=-static-libstdc++
make

For further documentation on the depends system see README.md in the depends directory.