OpenBSD Build Guide

Updated for OpenBSD 7.5

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

Preparation

1. Install Required Dependencies

Run the following as root to install the base dependencies for building.

pkg_add git cmake boost libevent

See dependencies.md for a complete overview.

2. Clone Bitcoin Repo

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

3. Install Optional Dependencies

Wallet Dependencies

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

Descriptor Wallet Support

SQLite is required to support descriptor wallets.

pkg_add sqlite3

Legacy Wallet Support

BerkeleyDB is only required to support legacy wallets.

It is recommended to use Berkeley DB 4.8. You cannot use the BerkeleyDB library from ports. However you can build it yourself, using depends.

Refer to depends/README.md for detailed instructions.

gmake -C depends NO_BOOST=1 NO_LIBEVENT=1 NO_QT=1 NO_SQLITE=1 NO_ZMQ=1 NO_USDT=1
...
to: /path/to/bitcoin/depends/*-unknown-openbsd*

Then set BDB_PREFIX:

export BDB_PREFIX="[path displayed above]"

GUI Dependencies

Qt5

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

pkg_add qtbase qttools

libqrencode

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

pkg_add libqrencode

Otherwise, if you don't need QR encoding support, use the -DWITH_QRENCODE=OFF option to disable this feature in order to compile the GUI.

Notifications

ZeroMQ

Bitcoin Core can provide notifications via ZeroMQ. If the package is installed, support will be compiled in.

pkg_add zeromq

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:

pkg_add python  # Select the newest version of the package.

Building Bitcoin Core

1. Configuration

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

Descriptor Wallet and GUI:

This enables descriptor wallet support and the GUI, assuming SQLite and Qt 5 are installed.

cmake -B build -DWITH_SQLITE=ON -DBUILD_GUI=ON

Run cmake -B build -LH to see the full list of available options.

Descriptor & Legacy Wallet. No GUI:

This enables support for both wallet types:

cmake -B build -DBerkeleyDB_INCLUDE_DIR:PATH="${BDB_PREFIX}/include" -DWITH_BDB=ON

2. Compile

cmake --build build     # Use "-j N" 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.

Resource limits

If the build runs into out-of-memory errors, the instructions in this section might help.

The standard ulimit restrictions in OpenBSD are very strict:

data(kbytes)         1572864

This is, unfortunately, in some cases not enough to compile some .cpp files in the project, (see issue #6658). If your user is in the staff group the limit can be raised with:

ulimit -d 3000000

The change will only affect the current shell and processes spawned by it. To make the change system-wide, change datasize-cur and datasize-max in /etc/login.conf, and reboot.