bitcoin/doc/build-openbsd.md

OpenBSD Build Guide

Updated for OpenBSD 7.4

This guide describes how to build bitcoind, command-line utilities, and GUI on OpenBSD.

Preparation

1. Install Required Dependencies

Run the following as root to install the base dependencies for building.

pkg_add bash git gmake libevent libtool boost
# Select the newest version of the following packages:
pkg_add autoconf automake python

See dependencies.md for a complete overview.

2. Clone Bitcoin Repo

Clone the Bitcoin Core repository to a directory. All build scripts and commands will run from this directory.

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git

3. Install Optional Dependencies

Wallet Dependencies

It is not necessary to build wallet functionality to run either bitcoind or bitcoin-qt.

Descriptor Wallet Support

sqlite3 is required to support descriptor wallets.

pkg_add sqlite3

Legacy Wallet Support

BerkeleyDB is only required to support legacy wallets.

It is recommended to use Berkeley DB 4.8. You cannot use the BerkeleyDB library from ports. However you can build it yourself, using depends.

Refer to depends/README.md for detailed instructions.

gmake -C depends NO_BOOST=1 NO_LIBEVENT=1 NO_QT=1 NO_SQLITE=1 NO_NATPMP=1 NO_UPNP=1 NO_ZMQ=1 NO_USDT=1
...
to: /path/to/bitcoin/depends/x86_64-unknown-openbsd

Then set BDB_PREFIX:

export BDB_PREFIX="/path/to/bitcoin/depends/x86_64-unknown-openbsd"

GUI Dependencies

Qt5

Bitcoin Core includes a GUI built with the cross-platform Qt Framework. To compile the GUI, Qt 5 is required.

pkg_add qt5

Building Bitcoin Core

Important: Use gmake (the non-GNU make will exit with an error).

Preparation:

# Adapt the following for the version you installed (major.minor only):
export AUTOCONF_VERSION=2.71
export AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.16

./autogen.sh

1. Configuration

There are many ways to configure Bitcoin Core, here are a few common examples:

Descriptor Wallet and GUI:

This enables the GUI and descriptor wallet support, assuming sqlite and qt5 are installed.

./configure MAKE=gmake

Descriptor & Legacy Wallet. No GUI:

This enables support for both wallet types and disables the GUI:

./configure --with-gui=no \
    BDB_LIBS="-L${BDB_PREFIX}/lib -ldb_cxx-4.8" \
    BDB_CFLAGS="-I${BDB_PREFIX}/include" \
    MAKE=gmake

2. Compile

Important: Use gmake (the non-GNU make will exit with an error).

gmake # use "-j N" for N parallel jobs
gmake check # Run tests if Python 3 is available

Resource limits

If the build runs into out-of-memory errors, the instructions in this section might help.

The standard ulimit restrictions in OpenBSD are very strict:

data(kbytes)         1572864

This is, unfortunately, in some cases not enough to compile some .cpp files in the project, (see issue #6658). If your user is in the staff group the limit can be raised with:

ulimit -d 3000000

The change will only affect the current shell and processes spawned by it. To make the change system-wide, change datasize-cur and datasize-max in /etc/login.conf, and reboot.