build.md

Building

• Update to the latest development build of Binary Ninja

  • Follow this guide to do so

• Clone binaryninja-api and checkout to the corresponding commit used to build the version of Binary Ninja you are running

  • If you updated to the latest dev build of Binary Ninja, then you can checkout the api repo to the latest dev as well
  • A more robust approach is to find the file api_REVISION.txt in BN_INSTALLATION_FOLDER/Resources

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Vector35/binaryninja-api.git
cd binaryninja-api
git checkout dev
# or git checkout commit_hash

• Download LLDB development build for your OS at https://github.com/Vector35/lldb-artifacts/releases/latest - make sure that the correct LLDB version is downloaded (grep 'LLVM_VERSION ' core/CMakeLists.txt can help)

  • Extract the zip archive to ~/libclang

• Download Qt development build for your OS at https://github.com/Vector35/qt-artifacts/releases/latest.

  • Extract the zip archive to ~/Qt

• Build the debugger

# Get the source
git clone https://github.com/Vector35/debugger.git

# Do an out-of-source build
mkdir -p build
cd build

# Build it
cmake -DBN_API_PATH=../binaryninja-api -DBN_INSTALL_DIR=/path/to/binaryninja/installation ..

make

While the code is compiling, it's a good time to check the Binary Ninja slack for any updates!

The build artifacts will be in the folder out. You should find two files libdebuggercore and libdebuggerui, and two folders debugger (that contains the Python code) and lldb.

• Run the debugger
  • Open Binary Ninja, disable the setting corePlugins.debugger so the debugger that comes with Binary Ninja is not loaded
  • Close Binary Ninja
  • Copy everything in the out folder to the user plugin folder - cp -r out/plugins/* ~/.binaryninja/plugins/
  • Set the environment variable BN_STANDALONE_DEBUGGER=1
  • Launch BinaryNinja

Notes:

• On Windows, building the debugger in Debug mode may cause obscure bugs since the debug ABI of MSVC can be different from that of the release build. It is recommended to build with RelWithDebInfo on Windows.