# NASM - The Netwide Assembler

## version 3.01

## Appendix D: Building NASM from Source

The source code for NASM is available from our website, `https://www.nasm.us/`, see section E.1.

### D.1. Building from a Source Archive

The source archives available on the web site should be capable of building on a number of platforms. This is the recommended method for building NASM to support platforms for which executables are not available, if you do not require changing the source code.

The preferred build platforms are development environments which support POSIX (Unix)-style tools (a "POSIX environment"). For Windows, MSYS2 (`https://www.msys2.org/`) is such a development environment. Normally either `gcc` or `clang` is used as the compiler, but it is also possible to use MSVC with a POSIX wrapper like `cccl` from the SWIG project.

In a POSIX environment, run:

         sh configure
         make

A number of options can be passed to `configure`; see `sh configure --help`. In particular, the `--host` option can be used to cross-compile NASM to run on another host system.

For non-POSIX environments, a set of makefiles for a handful of other environments are also available; please see the file `Mkfiles/README`. These makefiles are generally considered unreliable, as we have very little ability to test them.

The `.zip` version of the source archive has DOS/Windows line endings (`CR LF`), which many Unix/POSIX systems will not recognize. To extract the `.zip` version on such a system, use `unzip -a`. The `.tar` versions of the source archive has POSIX line endings (`LF`).

### D.2. Optional Build Tools

The following additional tools are required to build specific subsystems, to build from the `git` repository, or if the sources are modified.

Note that some of these tools will have their own dependencies.

Make sure all tools are available in your `PATH` (or equivalent.)

To build the installer for the Windows platform:

- The Nullsoft Scriptable Installer (NSIS, `https://nsis-dev.github.io/`).

To modify the sources, or to build the documentation:

- A Perl interpreter (`https://www.perl.org/`).

- Modules from CPAN (`https://www.cpan.org/`). The following Perl modules are currently required, some of which will be bundled with the Perl interpreter or into larger CPAN packages:

           Compress::Zlib
           Fcntl
           File::Basename
           File::Compare
           File::Copy
           File::Find
           File::Path
           File::Spec
           File::Temp
           Font::TTF::Cmap
           Font::TTF::Font
           Font::TTF::Head
           Font::TTF::Hmtx
           Font::TTF::Maxp
           Font::TTF::PSNames
           Font::TTF::Post
           Getopt::Long
           JSON
           Pod::Usage
           Sort::Versions
           Win32 (if building on Windows only)

To build the documentation:

- Either Ghostscript (`https://www.ghostscript.com/`) or Adobe Acrobat Distiller (untested.)

- The Google Roboto and Roboto Mono fonts, which are freely available under the SIL Open Font License (`https://github.com/google/roboto`).

To build the Unix man pages:

- AsciiDoc (`https://asciidoc.org/`).

- xmlto (`https://pagure.io/xmlto/`).

To build from the `git` repository on a POSIX platform:

- GNU `m4`, `autoconf` and `autoheader` (`https://www.gnu.org/`).

### D.3. Building Optional Components

Install the required tools for the subsystem in question as described in section D.2.

To build the documentation:

         make doc

Building the documentation may not work in a non-POSIX environment.

To build the Windows installer:

         make nsis

To build the Unix man pages:

         make manpages

To build everything available on the current platform:

         make everything

### D.4. Building from the `git` Repository

The NASM development tree is kept in a source code repository using the `git` distributed source control system. The link is available on the website. This is recommended only to participate in the development of NASM or to assist with testing the development code.

Install the required tools as described in section section D.2.

In a POSIX environment:

Run:

         sh autogen.sh

to create the `configure` script and then build as described in section D.1.

In a non-POSIX environment, use the tool-specific Makefiles as described in section D.1.

### D.5. Modifying the Sources

To build modified sources, you will need the tools described in section D.2.

Some build system changes might not be possible without a POSIX environment.

If you have modified the sources to change the embedded declarations of warning classes, you may have to manually re-build the warning catalog:

         make warnings

This is not done automatically, as the tools do not have the ability to automatically detect when it is necessary to do so.