cpp-ethereum - Ethereum C++ client

This repository contains cpp-ethereum, the Ethereum C++ client.

It is the third most popular of the Ethereum clients, behind geth (the go client) and Parity (the rust client). The code is exceptionally portable and has been used successfully on a very broad range of operating systems and hardware.

Contact

Chat in cpp-ethereum channel on Gitter.
Report bugs, issues or feature requests using GitHub issues.

Getting Started

The Ethereum Documentation site hosts the cpp-ethereum homepage, which has a Quick Start section.

Operating system	Status
Ubuntu and macOS
Windows

Building from source

Get the source code

Git and GitHub is used to maintain the source code. Clone the repository by:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum.git
cd cpp-ethereum

The --recursive option is important. It orders git to clone additional submodules which are required to build the project. If you missed it you can correct your mistake with command git submodule update --init.

Install CMake

CMake is used to control the build configuration of the project. Quite recent version of CMake is required (at the time of writing 3.4.3 is the minimum). We recommend installing CMake by downloading and unpacking the binary distribution of the latest version available on the CMake download page.

The CMake package available in your operating system can also be installed and used if it meets the minimum version requirement.

Alternative method

The repository contains the scripts/install_cmake.sh script that downloads a fixed version of CMake and unpacks it to the given directory prefix. Example usage: scripts/install_cmake.sh --prefix /usr/local.

Install dependencies (Linux, macOS)

The following libraries are required to be installed in the system in their development variant:

leveldb
microhttpd

They usually can be installed using system-specific package manager. Examples for some systems:

Operating system	Installation command
Debian-based	`sudo apt-get install libleveldb-dev libmicrohttpd-dev`
RedHat-based	`dnf install leveldb-devel libmicrohttpd-devel`
macOS	`brew install leveldb libmicrohttpd`

We also support a "one-button" shell script scripts/install_deps.sh which attempts to aggregate dependencies installation instructions for Unix-like operating systems. It identifies your distro and installs the external packages. Supporting the script is non-trivial task so please inform us if it does not work for your use-case.

Install dependencies (Windows)

We provide prebuilt dependencies required to build the project. Download them with the scripts/install_deps.bat script.

scripts/install_deps.bat

Build

Configure the project build with the following command. It will create the build directory with the configuration.

mkdir build; cd build  # Create a build directory.
cmake ..               # Configure the project.
cmake --build .        # Build all default targets.

On Windows Visual Studio 2015 is required. You should generate Visual Studio solution file (.sln) for 64-bit architecture by adding -G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" argument to the CMake configure command. After configuration is completed the cpp-ethereum.sln can be found in the build directory.

cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64"

Contributing

The current codebase is the work of many, many hands, with nearly 100 individual contributors over the course of its development.

Our day-to-day development chat happens on the cpp-ethereum Gitter channel.

All contributions are welcome! We try to keep a list of tasks that are suitable for newcomers under the tag up-for-grabs. If you have any questions, please just ask.

Please read CodingStandards.txt thoroughly before making alterations to the code base.

All development goes in develop branch.

Mining

This project is not suitable for Ethereum mining. The support for GPU mining has been dropped some time ago including the ethminer tool. Use the ethminer tool from https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer.

Testing

To run the tests, make sure you clone https://github.com/ethereum/tests and point the environment variable ETHEREUM_TEST_PATH to that path.

Documentation

License

All contributions are made under the GNU General Public License v3. See LICENSE.

Quanwei1992 / cpp-ethereum