Building Nym

This page details how to build the main Nym platform code, in Rust. If you want to build and run a validator, go here instead.

Nym runs on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Windows should be considered experimental - it works fine if you’re an app developer but isn’t recommended for running nodes.

Prerequisites:

  • on Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install pkg-config build-essential libssl-dev curl jq.
  • Rust 1.47 or later, with cargo. Stable works.

We recommend using the Rust shell script installer. Installing cargo from your package manager (e.g. apt) is not recommended as the packaged versions are usually too old.

If you really don’t want to use the shell script installer, the Rust installation docs contain instructions for many platforms.

To download and build the Nym platform (mixnode, gateway and clients):

rustup update
git clone https://github.com/nymtech/nym.git
cd nym
git reset --hard # in case you made any changes on your branch
git pull # in case you've checked it out before
#
# Note: the default branch you clone from Github, `develop`, is guaranteed to be
# broken and incompatible with the running testnet at all times. You *must*
# `git checkout tags/v0.9.2` in order to join the testnet.
#
git checkout tags/v0.9.2
cargo build --release

The above commands will compile binaries into the nym/target/release directory.

Quite a bit of stuff gets built. The key working parts are:

  1. the mixnode: nym-mixnode
  2. the gateway node: nym-gateway
  3. the websocket client: nym-client
  4. the socks5 client: nym-socks5-client
  5. the network requester: nym-network-requester

If you run into trouble, please ask for help in the channel nymtech.friends#general on KeyBase.