Building Zcashd & Zcash-cli on Debian/Ubuntu

Please upgrade! End of Debian Jessie support was on October 1st 2020.

Zcashd & Zcash-cli are officially supported for Debian/Ubuntu. Since Debian/Ubuntu is the best supported platform, we recommend running Zcashd & Zcash-cli on Debian/Ubuntu if possible.

Instructions

There are multiple ways to download dependencies and build Zcashd & Zcash-cli. We’ve listed the various ways, in order of recommendation (try the packages first!).

• Debian Packages Setup; below video follows these instructions.

  This is the easiest and most streamlined method.

• Building from source

  This requires downloading dependencies manually via the command line (libtinfo5 is required for v4.1.1):

   sudo apt-get install \
   build-essential pkg-config libc6-dev m4 g++-multilib \
   autoconf libtool ncurses-dev unzip git python3 python3-zmq \
   zlib1g-dev curl bsdmainutils automake libtinfo5
  

  And downloading the source code from the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/zcash/zcash.git
   cd zcash/
   git checkout v5.8.0
   ./zcutil/fetch-params.sh
  

  Then building Zcashd & Zcash-cli:

  ./zcutil/clean.sh
  ./zcutil/build.sh -j$(nproc)
  

  (If you don’t have nproc, then substitute the number of cores on your system. If the build runs out of memory, try again without the -j argument, i.e. just ./zcutil/build.sh.)

• Binary Tarball Download and Setup

  The .tar file unzips into a directory and does not involve a package manager, so it is agnostic of whether that system uses an OS package manager or which one it uses.

Next steps

Now that you’ve built Zcashd & Zcash-cli, we can move on to the next steps of: configuration, sync, and use. Refer back to the Zcashd & Zcash-cli page for further instructions.