Compiling for X11 (Linux, *BSD)

This page describes how to compile Linux editor and export template binaries from source. If you’re looking to export your project to Linux instead, read Exporting for Linux.

For compiling under Linux or other Unix variants, the following is required:

GCC 7+ or Clang 6+.
Python 3.5+.
SCons 3.0+ build system. If your distribution uses Python 2 by default, or you are using a version of SCons prior to 3.1.2, you will need to change the version of Python that SCons uses by changing the shebang (the first line) of the SCons script file to . Use the command which scons to find the location of the SCons script file.
pkg-config (used to detect the dependencies below).
X11, Xcursor, Xinerama, Xi and XRandR development libraries.
MesaGL development libraries.
ALSA development libraries.
PulseAudio development libraries.
Optional - libudev (build with udev=yes).
Optional - yasm (for WebM SIMD optimizations).

Compiling

Start a terminal, go to the root dir of the engine source code and type:

scons -j8 platform=x11

A good rule of thumb for the -j (jobs) flag, is to have at least as many threads compiling Godot as you have cores in your CPU, if not one or two more. Feel free to add the -j option to any SCons command you see below.

If all goes well, the resulting binary executable will be placed in the “bin” subdirectory. This executable file contains the whole engine and runs without any dependencies. Executing it will bring up the project manager.

Note

If you wish to compile using Clang rather than GCC, use this command:

scons platform=x11 use_llvm=yes

Using Clang appears to be a requirement for OpenBSD, otherwise fonts would not build.

Note

If you are compiling Godot for production use, then you can make the final executable smaller and faster by adding the SCons option target=release_debug.

If you are compiling Godot with GCC, you can make the binary even smaller and faster by adding the SCons option use_lto=yes. As link-time optimization is a memory-intensive process, this will require about 7 GB of available RAM while compiling.

Note

If you want to use separate editor settings for your own Godot builds and official releases, you can enable Self-contained mode by creating a file called ._sc_ or _sc_ in the bin/ folder.

To compile a headless build which provides editor functionality to export projects in an automated manner, use:

scons -j8 platform=server tools=yes target=release_debug

To compile a debug server build which can be used with remote debugging tools, use:

To compile a server build which is optimized to run dedicated game servers, use:

Building export templates

Linux binaries usually won’t run on distributions that are older than the distribution they were built on. If you wish to distribute binaries that work on most distributions, you should build them on an old distribution such as Ubuntu 16.04. You can use a virtual machine or a container to set up a suitable build environment.

To build X11 (Linux, *BSD) export templates, run the build system with the following parameters:

(32 bits)

scons platform=x11 tools=no target=release bits=32
scons platform=x11 tools=no target=release_debug bits=32

(64 bits)

scons platform=x11 tools=no target=release bits=64
scons platform=x11 tools=no target=release_debug bits=64

Note that cross-compiling for the opposite bits (64/32) as your host platform is not always straight-forward and might need a chroot environment.

To create standard export templates, the resulting files must be copied to:

and named like this (even for *BSD which is seen as “Linux X11” by Godot):

linux_x11_32_debug
linux_x11_32_release
linux_x11_64_debug
linux_x11_64_release

However, if you are writing your custom modules or custom C++ code, you might instead want to configure your binaries as custom export templates here:

You don’t even need to copy them, you can just reference the resulting files in the bin/ directory of your Godot source folder, so the next time you build, you automatically have the custom templates referenced.

You can also use Clang and LLD to build Godot. This has two upsides compared to the default GCC + GNU ld setup:

LLD links Godot significantly faster compared to GNU ld or gold. This leads to faster iteration times.
Clang tends to give more useful error messages compared to GCC.

To do so, install Clang and the lld package from your distribution’s package manager then use the following SCons command:

scons platform=x11 use_llvm=yes use_lld=yes

After the build is completed, a new binary with a .llvm suffix will be created in the bin/ folder.

It’s still recommended to use GCC for production builds as they can be compiled using link-time optimization, making the resulting binaries smaller and faster.

Using Pyston for faster development

You can use Pyston to run SCons. Pyston is a JIT-enabled implementation of the Python language (which SCons is written in). It is currently only compatible with Linux. Pyston can speed up incremental builds significantly, often by a factor between 1.5× and 2×. Pyston can be combined with Clang and LLD to get even faster builds.

Download the .
Extract the portable .tar.gz to a set location, such as $HOME/.local/opt/pyston/ (create folders as needed).
Use cd to reach the extracted Pyston folder from a terminal, then run ./pyston -m pip install scons to install SCons within Pyston.
To make SCons via Pyston easier to run, create a symbolic link of its wrapper script to a location in your PATH environment variable:
Instead of running scons <build arguments>, run pyston-scons <build arguments> to compile Godot.