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Installing Zebra

To install Zebra, follow the Getting Started section.

Optional Configs & Features

Zebra supports a variety of optional features which you can enable and configure manually.

Initializing Configuration File

zebrad generate -o ~/.config/zebrad.toml

The above command places the generated zebrad.toml config file in the default preferences directory of Linux. For other OSes default locations see here.

Configuring Progress Bars

Configure tracing.progress_bar in your zebrad.toml to show key metrics in the terminal using progress bars. When progress bars are active, Zebra automatically sends logs to a file.

There is a known issue where progress bar estimates become extremely large.

In future releases, the progress_bar = "summary" config will show a few key metrics, and the "detailed" config will show all available metrics. Please let us know which metrics are important to you!

Configuring Mining

Zebra can be configured for mining by passing a MINER_ADDRESS and port mapping to Docker. See the mining support docs for more details.

Custom Build Features

You can also build Zebra with additional Cargo features:

You can combine multiple features by listing them as parameters of the --features flag:

cargo install --features="<feature1> <feature2> ..." ...

Our full list of experimental and developer features is in the API documentation.

Some debugging and monitoring features are disabled in release builds to increase performance.

Alternative Compilation Methods

Zebra also supports the following compilation methods.

Compiling Manually from git

To compile Zebra directly from GitHub, or from a GitHub release source archive:

  1. Install the dependencies as described in the Getting Started section.

  2. Get the source code using git or from a GitHub source package

git clone https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra.git
cd zebra
git checkout v2.3.0
  1. Build and Run zebrad
cargo build --release --bin zebrad
target/release/zebrad start

Compiling from git using cargo install

cargo install --git https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra --tag v2.3.0 zebrad

Compiling on ARM

If you're using an ARM machine, install the Rust compiler for ARM. If you build using the x86_64 tools, Zebra might run really slowly.

Build Troubleshooting

If you're having trouble with:

Compilers

  • clang: install both libclang and clang - they are usually different packages
  • libclang: check out the clang-sys documentation
  • g++ or MSVC++: try using clang or Xcode instead
  • rustc: use the latest stable rustc and cargo versions
    • Zebra does not have a minimum supported Rust version (MSRV) policy: any release can update the required Rust version.

Dependencies

  • use cargo install without --locked to build with the latest versions of each dependency

Experimental Shielded Scanning feature

  • install the rocksdb-tools or rocksdb packages to get the ldb binary, which allows expert users to query the scanner database. This binary is sometimes called rocksdb_ldb.

Optional Tor feature

  • sqlite linker errors: libsqlite3 is an optional dependency of the zebra-network/tor feature. If you don't have it installed, you might see errors like note: /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lsqlite3. Follow the arti instructions to install libsqlite3, or use one of these commands instead:
cargo build
cargo build -p zebrad --all-features