Build WasmEdge from source

Please follow this guide to build and test WasmEdge from the source code.

The following guide is for Linux distributions. For MacOS, please refer to Build for macOS. For Windows, please refer to Build for Windows. For Android, please refer to Build for Android.

If you just want the latest builds from the HEAD of the master branch, and do not want to build it yourself, you can download the release package directly from our Github Action’s CI artifact. Here is an example.

Get Source Code

git clone https://github.com/WasmEdge/WasmEdge.git
cd WasmEdge

Check Dependencies

WasmEdge will try to use the latest LLVM release to build the nightly build. If you want to build from source, you may need to install these dependencies by yourself or using our docker images which support several Linux distributions.

• LLVM 12.0.0 (>= 10.0.0)
• GCC 11.1.0 (>= 9.4.0)

Prepare the Environment

Docker Images

Repository on dockerhub wasmedge/wasmedge

You can use the following commands to get our latest docker image:

docker pull wasmedge/wasmedge # Pulls the latest - wasmedge/wasmedge:latest

Available Tags

Install dependencies on Ubuntu 20.04 manually

# Tools and libraries
sudo apt install -y \
   software-properties-common \
   cmake \
   libboost-all-dev
# And you will need to install llvm for wasmedgec tool
sudo apt install -y \
   llvm-12-dev \
   liblld-12-dev
# WasmEdge supports both clang++ and g++ compilers
# You can choose one of them for building this project
# If you prefer GCC then
sudo apt install -y gcc g++
# Or if you prefer clang then
sudo apt install -y clang-12

Support for legacy operating systems

Our development environment requires libLLVM-12 and >=GLIBCXX_3.4.33.

If users are using operating systems older than Ubuntu 20.04, please use our special docker image to build WasmEdge. If you are looking for the pre-built binaries for the older operating system, we also provide several pre-built binaries based on manylinux* distribution.

Build WasmEdge

WasmEdge provides various tools for enabling different runtime environments for optimal performance. You can find that there are several wasmedge related tools:

1. wasmedge is the general wasm runtime.
   • wasmedge executes a WASM file in the interpreter mode or a compiled WASM so (shared object) file in the ahead-of-time compilation mode.
   • To disable building all tools, you can set the CMake option WASMEDGE_BUILD_TOOLS to OFF.
2. wasmedgec is the ahead-of-time WASM compiler.
   • wasmedgec compiles a general WASM file into a so (shared object) file.
   • To disable building the ahead-of-time compiler only, you can set the CMake option WASMEDGE_BUILD_AOT_RUNTIME to OFF.
3. libwasmedge_c.so is the WasmEdge C API shared library.
   • libwasmedge_c.so provides the C API for the ahead-of-time compiler and the WASM runtime.
   • The APIs related to the ahead-of-time compiler will always fail if the CMake option WASMEDGE_BUILD_AOT_RUNTIME is set as OFF.
   • To disable building just the shared library, you can set the CMake option WASMEDGE_BUILD_SHARED_LIB to OFF.
4. ssvm-qitc is for AI applications and supports the ONNC runtime for AI models in the ONNX format.
   • If you want to try ssvm-qitc, please refer to ONNC-Wasm project to set up the working environment and tryout several examples.
   • And here is our tutorial for ONNC-Wasm project(YouTube Video).

# After pulling our wasmedge docker image
docker run -it --rm \
    -v <path/to/your/wasmedge/source/folder>:/root/wasmedge \
    wasmedge/wasmedge:latest
# In docker
cd /root/wasmedge
# If you don't use docker then you need to run only the following commands in the cloned repository root
mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DWASMEDGE_BUILD_TESTS=ON .. && make -j

If you don’t want to build Ahead-of-Time runtime/compiler

If you don’t need Ahead-of-Time runtime/compiler support, you can set the CMake option WASMEDGE_BUILD_AOT_RUNTIME to OFF.

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DWASMEDGE_BUILD_AOT_RUNTIME=OFF ..

Run built-in tests

The following built-in tests are only available when the build flag WASMEDGE_BUILD_TESTS is set to ON.

Users can use these tests to verify the correctness of WasmEdge binaries built.

# In docker
cd <path/to/wasmedge/build_folder>
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd)/lib/api ctest

Run applications

Next, follow this guide to run WebAssembly bytecode programs in wasmedge.