Building and Installing Zebra

The easiest way to install and run Zebra is to follow the Getting Started section.

Building Zebra

If you want to build Zebra, install the build dependencies as described in the Manual Install section, and get the source code from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra.git
cd zebra

You can then build and run zebrad by:

cargo build --release --bin zebrad
target/release/zebrad start

If you rebuild Zebra often, you can speed the build process up by dynamically linking RocksDB, which is a C++ dependency, instead of rebuilding it and linking it statically. If you want to utilize dynamic linking, first install RocksDB version >= 8.9.1 as a system library. On Arch Linux, you can do that by:

pacman -S rocksdb

On Ubuntu version >= 24.04, that would be

apt install -y librocksdb-dev

Once you have the library installed, set

export ROCKSDB_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib/"

and enjoy faster builds. Dynamic linking will also decrease the size of the resulting zebrad binary in release mode by ~ 6 MB.

Building on ARM

If you're using an ARM machine, install the Rust compiler for ARM. If you build Zebra using the x86_64 tools, it might run really slowly.

Build Troubleshooting

If you are having trouble with:

• clang: Install both libclang and clang - they are usually different packages.
• libclang: Check out the clang-sys documentation.
• g++ or MSVC++: Try using clang or Xcode instead.
• rustc: Use the latest stable rustc and cargo versions.
• dependencies: Use cargo install without --locked to build with the latest versions of each dependency.

Optional Tor feature

The zebra-network/tor feature has an optional dependency named libsqlite3. If you don't have it installed, you might see errors like note: /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lsqlite3. Follow the arti instructions to install libsqlite3, or use one of these commands instead:

cargo build
cargo build -p zebrad --all-features