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Building and Installing Zebra

The easiest way to install and run Zebra is to follow the Getting Started section.

Pre-built binaries

Every GitHub release ships pre-built zebrad binaries for Linux on x86_64 and aarch64, as zebrad-<version>-<target>.tar.gz archives. They are built on Ubuntu 22.04 and need glibc 2.34 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04+, Debian 12+, RHEL 9+, Amazon Linux 2023); on older or other platforms use the Docker image or build from source.

Install the latest release with cargo binstall:

cargo binstall zebrad

Or download an archive, verify it, and extract zebrad:

gh attestation verify zebrad-<version>-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz \
  --repo ZcashFoundation/zebra \
  --signer-workflow ZcashFoundation/zebra/.github/workflows/zfnd-release-binaries.yml
cosign verify-blob SHA256SUMS \
  --bundle SHA256SUMS.sigstore.json \
  --certificate-identity-regexp='^https://github\.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra/\.github/workflows/zfnd-release-binaries\.yml@' \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer='https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com'
sha256sum --ignore-missing -c SHA256SUMS
tar xzf zebrad-<version>-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Building Zebra

If you want to build Zebra, install the build dependencies as described in the Manual Install section, and get the source code from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra.git
cd zebra

You can then build and run zebrad by:

cargo build --release --bin zebrad
target/release/zebrad start

If you rebuild Zebra often, you can speed the build process up by dynamically linking RocksDB, which is a C++ dependency, instead of rebuilding it and linking it statically. If you want to utilize dynamic linking, first install RocksDB version >= 8.9.1 as a system library. On Arch Linux, you can do that by:

pacman -S rocksdb

On Ubuntu version >= 24.04, that would be

apt install -y librocksdb-dev

Once you have the library installed, set

export ROCKSDB_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib/"

and enjoy faster builds. Dynamic linking will also decrease the size of the resulting zebrad binary in release mode by ~ 6 MB.

Building on ARM

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

Build Troubleshooting

If you are having trouble with:

  • 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.
  • dependencies: Use cargo install without --locked to build with the latest versions of each dependency.

Optional Tor feature

The zebra-network/tor feature has an optional dependency named libsqlite3. 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