Build from Source

You can build Reth on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Windows WSL2.

Note

Reth does not work on Windows WSL1.

Dependencies

First, install Rust using rustup：

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

The rustup installer provides an easy way to update the Rust compiler, and works on all platforms.

Tips

During installation, when prompted, enter 1 for the default installation.

After Rust installation completes, try running cargo version . If it cannot be found, run source $HOME/.cargo/env. After that, running cargo version should return the version, for example cargo 1.68.2.

It's generally advisable to append source $HOME/.cargo/env to ~/.bashrc.

With Rust installed, follow the instructions below to install dependencies relevant to your operating system:

Ubuntu: apt-get install libclang-dev pkg-config build-essential
macOS: brew install llvm pkg-config
Windows: choco install llvm or winget install LLVM.LLVM

These are needed to build bindings for Reth's database.

Build Reth

With Rust and the dependencies installed, you're ready to build Reth. First, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/paradigmxyz/reth
cd reth

Then, install Reth into your PATH directly via:

cargo install --locked --path bin/reth --bin reth

The binary will now be accessible as reth via the command line, and exist under your default .cargo/bin folder.

Alternatively, you can build yourself with:

cargo build --release

This will place the reth binary under ./target/release/reth, and you can copy it to your directory of preference after that.

Compilation may take around 10 minutes. Installation was successful if reth --help displays the command-line documentation.

If you run into any issues, please check the Troubleshooting section, or reach out to us on Telegram.

Update Reth

You can update Reth to a specific version by running the commands below.

The reth directory will be the location you cloned reth to during the installation process.

${VERSION} will be the version you wish to build in the format vX.X.X.

cd reth
git fetch
git checkout ${VERSION}
cargo build --release

Optimizations

Profiles

You can customise the compiler settings used to compile Reth via Cargo profiles.

Reth includes several profiles which can be selected via the Cargo flag --profile.

release: default for source builds, enables most optimisations while not taking too long to compile.
maxperf: default for binary releases, enables aggressive optimisations including full LTO. Although compiling with this profile improves some benchmarks by around 20% compared to release, it imposes a significant cost at compile time and is only recommended if you have a fast CPU.

Rust compiler flags

You can also use RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" to enable CPU-specific optimisations. In order to get the highest performance out of your build:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --profile maxperf

Features

Finally, some optional features are present that may improve performance, but may not very portable, and as such might not compile on your particular system. These are currently:

jemalloc: replaces the default system memory allocator with jemalloc; this feature is unstable on Windows
asm-keccak: replaces the default, pure-Rust implementation of Keccak256 with one implemented in assembly; see the keccak-asm crate for more details and supported targets
min-LEVEL-logs, where LEVEL is one of error, warn, info, debug, trace: disables compilation of logs of lower level than the given one; this in general isn't that significant, and is not recommended due to the loss of debugging that the logs would provide

You can activate features by passing them to the --features or -F Cargo flag; multiple features can be activated with a space- or comma-separated list to the flag:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --profile maxperf --features jemalloc,asm-keccak

Troubleshooting

Command is not found

Reth will be installed to CARGO_HOME or $HOME/.cargo. This directory needs to be on your PATH before you can run $ reth.

See "Configuring the PATH environment variable" for more information.

Compilation error

Make sure you are running the latest version of Rust. If you have installed Rust using rustup, simply run rustup update.

If you can't install the latest version of Rust you can instead compile using the Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV) which is listed under the rust-version key in Reth's Cargo.toml.

If compilation fails with (signal: 9, SIGKILL: kill), this could mean your machine ran out of memory during compilation. If you are on Docker, consider increasing the memory of the container, or use a pre-built binary.

If compilation fails in either the keccak-asm or sha3-asm crates, it is likely that your current system configuration is not supported. See the keccak-asm target table for supported targets.

If compilation fails with error: linking with cc failed: exit code: 1, try running cargo clean.

(Thanks to Sigma Prime for this section from their Lighthouse book!)

Bus error (WSL2)

In WSL 2 on Windows, the default virtual disk size is set to 1TB.

You must increase the allocated disk size for your WSL2 instance before syncing reth.

You can follow the instructions here: how to expand the size of your WSL2 virtual hard disk.

reth Book