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macOS Build Guide

Updated for MacOS 14

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

Preparation

The commands in this guide should be executed in a Terminal application. macOS comes with a built-in Terminal located in:

/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app

1. Xcode Command Line Tools

The Xcode Command Line Tools are a collection of build tools for macOS. These tools must be installed in order to build Bitcoin Core from source.

To install, run the following command from your terminal:

xcode-select --install

Upon running the command, you should see a popup appear. Click on Install to continue the installation process.

2. Homebrew Package Manager

Homebrew is a package manager for macOS that allows one to install packages from the command line easily. While several package managers are available for macOS, this guide will focus on Homebrew as it is the most popular. Since the examples in this guide which walk through the installation of a package will use Homebrew, it is recommended that you install it to follow along. Otherwise, you can adapt the commands to your package manager of choice.

To install the Homebrew package manager, see: https://brew.sh

Note: If you run into issues while installing Homebrew or pulling packages, refer to Homebrew's troubleshooting page.

3. Install Required Dependencies

The first step is to download the required dependencies. These dependencies represent the packages required to get a barebones installation up and running.

See dependencies.md for a complete overview.

To install, run the following from your terminal:

brew install cmake boost pkg-config libevent

For macOS 11 (Big Sur) and 12 (Monterey) you need to install a more recent version of llvm.

brew install llvm

And append the following to the configure commands below:

-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER="$(brew --prefix llvm)/bin/clang" -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="$(brew --prefix llvm)/bin/clang++"

Try llvm@17 if compilation fails with the default version of llvm.

4. Clone Bitcoin repository

git should already be installed by default on your system. Now that all the required dependencies are installed, let's 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

5. Install Optional Dependencies

Wallet Dependencies

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

Descriptor Wallet Support

sqlite is required to support for descriptor wallets.

macOS ships with a useable sqlite package, meaning you don't need to install anything.

Legacy Wallet Support

berkeley-db@4 is only required to support for legacy wallets. Skip if you don't intend to use legacy wallets.

brew install berkeley-db@4

GUI Dependencies

Qt

Bitcoin Core includes a GUI built with the cross-platform Qt Framework. To compile the GUI, we need to install Qt, libqrencode and pass -DBUILD_GUI=ON. Skip if you don't intend to use the GUI.

brew install qt@5

Note: Building with Qt binaries downloaded from the Qt website is not officially supported. See the notes in #7714.

libqrencode

The GUI will be able to encode addresses in QR codes unless this feature is explicitly disabled. To install libqrencode, run:

brew install qrencode

Otherwise, if you don't need QR encoding support, you can pass -DWITH_QRENCODE=OFF to disable this feature.

Port Mapping Dependencies

miniupnpc

miniupnpc may be used for UPnP port mapping. Skip if you do not need this functionality.

brew install miniupnpc
libnatpmp

libnatpmp may be used for NAT-PMP port mapping. Skip if you do not need this functionality.

brew install libnatpmp

Check out the further configuration section for more information.

ZMQ Dependencies

Support for ZMQ notifications requires the following dependency. Skip if you do not need ZMQ functionality.

brew install zeromq

Check out the further configuration section for more information.

For more information on ZMQ, see: zmq.md

Test Suite Dependencies

There is an included test suite that is useful for testing code changes when developing. To run the test suite (recommended), you will need to have Python 3 installed:

brew install python

Deploy Dependencies

You can deploy a .zip containing the Bitcoin Core application. It is required that you have python installed.

Building Bitcoin Core

1. Configuration

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

Wallet (BDB + SQlite) Support, No GUI:

If berkeley-db@4 or sqlite are not installed, this will throw an error.

cmake -B build -DWITH_BDB=ON
Wallet (only SQlite) and GUI Support:

This enables the GUI. If sqlite or qt are not installed, this will throw an error.

cmake -B build -DBUILD_GUI=ON
No Wallet or GUI
cmake -B build -DENABLE_WALLET=OFF
Further Configuration

You may want to dig deeper into the configuration options to achieve your desired behavior. Examine the output of the following command for a full list of configuration options:

cmake -B build -LH

2. Compile

After configuration, you are ready to compile. Run the following in your terminal to compile Bitcoin Core:

cmake --build build     # Use "-j N" here for N parallel jobs.
ctest --test-dir build  # Use "-j N" for N parallel tests. Some tests are disabled if Python 3 is not available.

3. Deploy (optional)

You can also create a .zip containing the .app bundle by running the following command:

cmake --build build --target deploy

Running Bitcoin Core

Bitcoin Core should now be available at ./build/src/bitcoind. If you compiled support for the GUI, it should be available at ./build/src/qt/bitcoin-qt.

The first time you run bitcoind or bitcoin-qt, it will start downloading the blockchain. This process could take many hours, or even days on slower than average systems.

By default, blockchain and wallet data files will be stored in:

/Users/${USER}/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/

Before running, you may create an empty configuration file:

mkdir -p "/Users/${USER}/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin"

touch "/Users/${USER}/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/bitcoin.conf"

chmod 600 "/Users/${USER}/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/bitcoin.conf"

You can monitor the download process by looking at the debug.log file:

tail -f $HOME/Library/Application\ Support/Bitcoin/debug.log

Other commands:

./build/src/bitcoind -daemon      # Starts the bitcoin daemon.
./build/src/bitcoin-cli --help    # Outputs a list of command-line options.
./build/src/bitcoin-cli help      # Outputs a list of RPC commands when the daemon is running.
./build/src/qt/bitcoin-qt -server # Starts the bitcoin-qt server mode, allows bitcoin-cli control