# Botan

# Building The Library

This document describes how to build Botan on Unix/POSIX and Windows systems. The POSIX oriented descriptions should apply to most common Unix systems (including Apple macOS/Darwin), along with POSIX-ish systems like QNX.

Note

Botan is available already in nearly all packaging systems so you probably only need to build from source if you need unusual options or are building for an old system which has out of date packages.

Currently systems such as VMS, OS/390, and OS/400 are not supported by the build system, primarily due to lack of access and interest. Please contact the maintainer if you would like to build Botan on such a system.

Botan is a C++20 code base, make sure to use an appropriate compiler and settings. See also Support Information.

Botan’s build is controlled by configure.py, which is a Python script. Python 3.x or later is required.

For the impatient, this works for most systems:

    $ ./configure.py [--prefix=/some/directory]
    $ make
    $ make install

Or using `nmake`, if you’re compiling on Windows with Visual C++. On platforms that do not understand the ‘#!’ convention for beginning script files, or that have Python installed in an unusual spot, you might need to prefix the `configure.py` command with `python3` or `/path/to/python3`:

    $ python3 ./configure.py [arguments]

## Configuring the Build

The first step is to run `configure.py`, which is a Python script that creates various directories, config files, and a Makefile for building everything. This script should run under a vanilla install of Python 3.x.

The script will attempt to guess what kind of system you are trying to compile for (and will print messages telling you what it guessed). You can override this process by passing the options `--cc`, `--os`, and `--cpu`.

You can pass basically anything reasonable with `--cpu`: the script knows about a large number of different architectures, their sub-models, and common aliases for them. You should only select the 64-bit version of a CPU (such as “sparc64” or “mips64”) if your operating system knows how to handle 64-bit object code - a 32-bit kernel on a 64-bit CPU will generally not like 64-bit code.

By default the script tries to figure out what will work on your system, and use that. It will print a display at the end showing which modules have and have not been enabled. For instance on one system we might see lines like:

    INFO: Skipping (dependency failure): certstor_sqlite3 sessions_sqlite3
    INFO: Skipping (incompatible CPU): aes_power8
    INFO: Skipping (incompatible OS): darwin_secrandom getentropy win32_stats
    INFO: Skipping (incompatible compiler): aes_armv8 pmull sha1_armv8 sha2_32_armv8
    INFO: Skipping (no enabled compression schemes): compression
    INFO: Skipping (requires external dependency): boost bzip2 lzma sqlite3 tpm zlib

The ones that are skipped because they are require an external dependency have to be explicitly asked for, because they rely on third party libraries which your system might not have or that you might not want the resulting binary to depend on. For instance to enable zlib support, add `--with-zlib` to your invocation of `configure.py`. All available modules can be listed with `--list-modules`.

Some modules may be marked as ‘deprecated’ or ‘experimental’. Deprecated modules are available and built by default, but they will be removed in a future release of the library. Use `--disable-deprecated-features` to disable all of these modules or `--disable-modules=MODS` for finer grained control. Experimental modules are under active development and not built by default. Their API may change in future minor releases. Applications may still enable and use such modules using `--enable-modules=MODS` or using `--enable-experimental-features` to enable all experimental features.

You can control which algorithms and modules are built using the options `--enable-modules=MODS` and `--disable-modules=MODS`, for instance `--enable-modules=zlib` and `--disable-modules=xtea,idea`. Modules not listed on the command line will simply be loaded if needed or if configured to load by default. If you use `--minimized-build`, only the most core modules will be included; you can then explicitly enable things that you want to use with `--enable-modules`. This is useful for creating a minimal build targeting to a specific application, especially in conjunction with the amalgamation option; see The Amalgamation Build and Minimized Builds.

For instance:

    $ ./configure.py --minimized-build --enable-modules=rsa,eme_oaep,emsa_pssr

will set up a build that only includes RSA, OAEP, PSS along with any required dependencies. Note that a minimized build does not by default include any random number generator, which is needed for example to generate keys, nonces and IVs. See Random Number Generators on which random number generators are available.

## Common Build Targets

Build everything that is configured:

    $ make all

Build the unit test binary (`./botan-test` to run):

    $ make tests

Build and run the tests:

    $ make check

Build the documentation (Doxygen API reference and Sphinx handbook):

    $ make docs

Install the library:

    $ make install

Remove all generated artefacts:

    $ make clean

## Cross Compiling

Cross compiling refers to building software on one type of host (say Linux x86-64) but creating a binary for some other type (say MinGW x86-32). This is completely supported by the build system. To extend the example, we must tell configure.py to use the MinGW tools:

    $ ./configure.py --os=mingw --cpu=x86_32 --cc-bin=i686-w64-mingw32-g++ --ar-command=i686-w64-mingw32-ar
    ...
    $ make
    ...
    $ file botan.exe
    botan.exe: PE32 executable (console) Intel 80386, for MS Windows

Note

For whatever reason, some distributions of MinGW lack support for threading or mutexes in the C++ standard library. You can work around this by disabling thread support using `--without-os-feature=threads`

Warning

Using `--without-os-feature=threads` disables all support for threads, including any locking of internal data structures. In this configuration, calling into the library from multiple threads will cause data races.

You can also specify the alternate tools by setting the CXX and AR environment variables (instead of the –cc-bin and –ar-command options), as is commonly done with autoconf builds.

## On Unix

The basic build procedure on Unix and Unix-like systems is:

    $ ./configure.py [various options]
    $ make
    $ make check

If the tests look OK, install:

    $ make install

On Unix systems the script will default to using GCC; use `--cc` if you want something else. For instance use `--cc=clang` for Clang.

The `make install` target has a default directory in which it will install Botan (typically `/usr/local`). You can override this by using the `--prefix` argument to `configure.py`, like so:

    $ ./configure.py --prefix=/opt <other arguments>

On some systems shared libraries might not be immediately visible to the runtime linker. For example, on Linux you may have to edit `/etc/ld.so.conf` and run `ldconfig` (as root) in order for new shared libraries to be picked up by the linker. An alternative is to set your `LD_LIBRARY_PATH` shell variable to include the directory that the Botan libraries were installed into.

## On macOS

A standard build on macOS works much like that on any other Unix-like system.

One notable difference with macOS is the common usage of “universal binaries”, which is effectively a multiarch binary. This was used first for the PowerPC to x86 transition, and more recently for the x86 to Aarch64 transition.

Building a universal binary is a bit trickier for Botan compared with a standard application, as the library makes use of many architecture specific extensions, for example AES-NI and AVX2 on x86, and NEON and the ARMv8 crypto extensions on Aarch64. Botan’s build system also assumes that it is knowable at setup time which files are to be compiled.

Typically (for software with no architecture dependent code) a universal binary is built by adding additional compilation flags that look something like `-force_cpusubtype_ALL -arch x86_64 -arch arm64`. This effectively causes XCode to compile each file twice, once for x86_64 and again for Aarch64. For most source files this works fine, but for architecture-specific files it will result in errors when code specific to one architecture is encountered when compiling for a different architecture, resulting in errors like:

    $ make
    ...
    error: unknown target CPU 'armv8.2-a+sha3'
    note: valid target CPU values are: ...

There are currently two ways of proceeding.

The first is to use `--cpu=generic`. This disables all architecture specific code, which has performance implications, especially for algorithms with dedicated hardware support like AES. This can be alleviated somewhat by making sure the CommonCrypto provider (module `commoncrypto`) is built, since then Botan offloads many of these specific operations to CommonCrypto, which will be able to use the CPU instructions.

The second, and recommended, approach is to build twice and use `lipo` to combine the two binaries. This looks something like:

    $ ./configure.py --with-build-dir=botan_x86_64 --disable-cc-tests --build-targets=shared  --cpu=x86_64 --extra-cxxflags='-arch x86_64' --ldflags='-arch x86_64' --library-suffix=-x86_64
    $ make -j8 -f botan_x86_64/Makefile
    $ ./configure.py --with-build-dir=botan_aarch64 --disable-cc-tests --build-targets=shared  --cpu=aarch64 --extra-cxxflags='-arch arm64' --ldflags='-arch arm64' --library-suffix=-aarch64
    $ make -j8 -f botan_aarch64/Makefile
    $ lipo -create botan_aarch64/libbotan-3-aarch64.dylib botan_x86_64/libbotan-3-x86_64.dylib -o libbotan-3.dylib

## On Windows

Note

The earliest versions of Windows supported are Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2

You need to have a copy of Python installed, and have both Python and your chosen compiler in your path. Open a command shell (or the SDK shell), and run:

    $ python3 configure.py --cc=msvc --os=windows
    $ nmake
    $ nmake check
    $ nmake install

Microsoft’s `nmake` does not support building multiple jobs in parallel, which is unfortunate when building on modern multicore machines. It is possible to use the (somewhat unmaintained) Jom build tool, which is a `nmake` compatible build system that supports parallel builds. Alternately, starting in Botan 3.2, there is additionally support for using the `ninja` build tool as an alternative to `nmake`:

    $ python3 configure.py --cc=msvc --os=windows --build-tool=ninja
    $ ninja
    $ ninja check
    $ ninja install

For MinGW, use:

    $ python3 configure.py --cc=gcc --os=mingw
    $ make

By default the install target will be `C:\botan`; you can modify this with the `--prefix` option.

When building your applications, all you have to do is tell the compiler to look for both include files and library files in `C:\botan`, and it will find both. Or you can move them to a place where they will be in the default compiler search paths (consult your documentation and/or local expert for details).

## Ninja Support

Starting in Botan 3.2, there is additionally support for the ninja build system.

This is particularly useful on Windows as there the default build tool `nmake` does not support parallel jobs. The `ninja` based build also works on Unix and macOs systems.

Support for `ninja` is still new and there are probably some rough edges.

## For iOS using XCode

For iOS, you typically build for 3 architectures: armv7 (32 bit, older iOS devices), armv8-a (64 bit, recent iOS devices) and x86_64 for the iPhone simulator. You can build for these 3 architectures and then create a universal binary containing code for all of these architectures, so you can link to Botan for the simulator as well as for an iOS device.

To cross compile for armv7, configure and make with:

    $ ./configure.py --os=ios --prefix="iphone-32" --cpu=armv7 --cc=clang \
                     --cc-abi-flags="-arch armv7"
    $ xcrun --sdk iphoneos make install

To cross compile for armv8-a, configure and make with:

    $ ./configure.py --os=ios --prefix="iphone-64" --cpu=armv8-a --cc=clang \
                     --cc-abi-flags="-arch arm64"
    $ xcrun --sdk iphoneos make install

To compile for the iPhone Simulator, configure and make with:

    $ ./configure.py --os=ios --prefix="iphone-simulator" --cpu=x86_64 --cc=clang \
                     --cc-abi-flags="-arch x86_64"
    $ xcrun --sdk iphonesimulator make install

Now create the universal binary and confirm the library is compiled for all three architectures:

    $ xcrun --sdk iphoneos lipo -create -output libbotan-2.a \
                   iphone-32/lib/libbotan-2.a \
                   iphone-64/lib/libbotan-2.a \
                   iphone-simulator/lib/libbotan-2.a
    $ xcrun --sdk iphoneos lipo -info libbotan-2.a
    Architectures in the fat file: libbotan-2.a are: armv7 x86_64 armv64

The resulting static library can be linked to your app in Xcode.

## For Android

Modern versions of Android NDK use Clang and support C++20. Simply configure using the appropriate NDK compiler and `ar` (`ar` only needed if building the static library). Here we build for Aarch64 targeting Android API 28:

    $ export AR=/opt/android-ndk/toolchains/llvm/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/llvm-ar
    $ export CXX=/opt/android-ndk/toolchains/llvm/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/aarch64-linux-android28-clang++
    $ ./configure.py --os=android --cc=clang --cpu=arm64
    $ make

If you are building for mobile development, consider restricting the build to only what you need (see Minimized Builds) to minimize code size.

## Emscripten (WebAssembly)

To build for WebAssembly using Emscripten, try:

    ./configure.py --cpu=wasm --os=emscripten
    make

This will produce HTML files `botan-test.html` and `botan.html` along with a static archive `libbotan-3.a` which can be linked with other modules.

To use the Wasm SIMD128 extension for improved performance of certain algorithms (see `hardware_acceleration.rst`), ensure that you pass the `-msimd128` compilation flag.

## Supporting Older Distros

Some “stable” distributions, notably RHEL/CentOS, ship very obsolete versions of binutils, which do not support more recent CPU instructions. As a result when building you may receive errors like:

    Error: no such instruction: `sha256rnds2 %xmm0,%xmm4,%xmm3'

Depending on how old your binutils is, you may need to disable BMI2, AVX2, SHA-NI, and/or RDSEED. These can be disabled by passing the flags `--disable-bmi2`, `--disable-avx2`, `--disable-sha-ni`, and `--disable-rdseed` to `configure.py`.

## Other Build-Related Tasks

### Building The Documentation

There are two documentation options available, Sphinx and Doxygen. Sphinx will be used if `sphinx-build` is detected in the PATH, or if `--with-sphinx` is used at configure time. Doxygen is only enabled if `--with-doxygen` is used. Both are generated by the makefile target `docs`.

### The Amalgamation Build

You can also configure Botan to be built using only a single source file; this is quite convenient if you plan to embed the library into another application.

To generate the amalgamation, run `configure.py` with whatever options you would ordinarily use, along with the option `--amalgamation`. This will create two (rather large) files, `botan_all.h` and `botan_all.cpp`.

Warning

Compiling a single 120K+ line C++ file containing a variety of carefully optimized SIMD and inline asm has a way of triggering compiler bugs. When using an amalgamation build, be sure to build and run the test suite!

Note

The library will as usual be configured to target some specific operating system and CPU architecture. You can use the CPU target “generic” if you need to target multiple CPU architectures, but this has the effect of disabling all CPU specific features such as SIMD, AES instruction sets, or inline assembly. If you need to ship amalgamations for multiple targets, it would be better to create different amalgamation files for each individual target.

Whenever you would have included a botan header, you can then include `botan_all.h`, and include `botan_all.cpp` along with the rest of the source files in your build. If you want to be able to easily switch between amalgamated and non-amalgamated versions (for instance to take advantage of prepackaged versions of botan on operating systems that support it), you can instead ignore `botan_all.h` and use the headers from `build/include` as normal.

You can also build the library using Botan’s build system (as normal) but utilizing the amalgamation instead of the individual source files by running something like `./configure.py --amalgamation && make`. This is essentially a very simple form of link time optimization; because the entire library source is visible to the compiler, it has more opportunities for interprocedural optimizations. Additionally (assuming you are not making use of a compiler cache such as `ccache` or `sccache`) amalgamation builds usually have significantly shorter compile times for full rebuilds.

### Modules Relying on Third Party Libraries

Currently `configure.py` cannot detect if external libraries are available, so using them is controlled explicitly at build time by the user using

> - `--with-bzip2` enables the filters providing bzip2 compression and decompression. Requires the bzip2 development libraries to be installed.

> - `--with-zlib` enables the filters providing zlib compression and decompression. Requires the zlib development libraries to be installed.

> - `--with-lzma` enables the filters providing lzma compression and decompression. Requires the lzma development libraries to be installed.

> - `--with-sqlite3` enables using sqlite3 databases in various contexts (TLS session cache, PSK database, etc).

> - `--with-tpm` adds support for TPM 1.2 hardware via the TrouSerS library.

> - `--with-tpm2` adds support for TPM 2.0 hardware via the TSS2 library.

> - `--with-boost` enables using some Boost libraries. In particular Boost.Filesystem is used for a few operations (but on most platforms, a native API equivalent is available), and Boost.Asio is used to provide a few extra TLS related command line utilities.

### Multiple Builds

It may be useful to run multiple builds with different configurations. Specify `--with-build-dir=<dir>` to set up a build environment in a different directory.

### Setting Distribution Info

The build allows you to set some information about what distribution this build of the library comes from. It is particularly relevant to people packaging the library for wider distribution, to signify what distribution this build is from. Applications can test this value by checking the string value of the macro `BOTAN_DISTRIBUTION_INFO`. It can be set using the `--distribution-info` flag to `configure.py`, and otherwise defaults to “unspecified”. For instance, a Gentoo ebuild might set it with `--distribution-info="Gentoo ${PVR}"` where `${PVR}` is an ebuild variable automatically set to a combination of the library and ebuild versions.

### Local Configuration Settings

You may want to do something peculiar with the configuration; to support this there is a flag to `configure.py` called `--with-local-config=<file>`. The contents of the file are inserted into `build/build.h` which is (indirectly) included into every Botan header and source file.

Warning

This option is deprecated and is planned to be removed in 3.9.0

### Enabling or Disabling Use of Certain OS Features

Botan uses compile-time flags to enable or disable use of certain operating specific functions. You can also override these at build time if desired.

The default feature flags are given in the files in `src/build-data/os` in the `target_features` block. For example Linux defines flags like `getrandom`, `getauxval`, and `sockets`. The `configure.py` option `--list-os-features` will display all the feature flags for all operating system targets.

To disable a default-enabled flag, use `--without-os-feature=feat1,feat2,...`

To enable a flag that isn’t otherwise enabled, use `--with-os-feature=feat`. For example, modern Linux systems support the `getentropy` call, but it is not enabled by default because many older systems lack it. However if you know you will only deploy to recently updated systems you can use `--with-os-feature=getentropy` to enable it.

A special case if dynamic loading, which applications for certain environments will want to disable. There is no specific feature flag for this, but `--disable-modules=dyn_load` will prevent it from being used.

Note

Disabling `dyn_load` module will also disable the PKCS #11 wrapper, which relies on dynamic loading.

### Feature Check Macros

When `build.h` is created, a set of macros are defined which can be used for compile-time feature checks.

Each of these macros has the form `BOTAN_HAS_FOO`, for example `BOTAN_HAS_RSA` or `BOTAN_HAS_TLS_13`. Each of these macros also has a value, which corresponds to a YYYYMMDD date code integer. If a user-visible change is made to a module (for example adding a particular feature) the date code is set to a new value. This can be useful for applications if they need to check that both a feature is enabled in general and that it supports some specific feature that was added in a particular change.

## Building Applications

### Unix

Botan usually links in several different system libraries (such as `librt` or `libz`), depending on which modules are configured at compile time. In many environments, particularly ones using static libraries, an application has to link against the same libraries as Botan for the linking step to succeed. But how does it figure out what libraries it is linked against?

The answer is to ask the `botan` command line tool using the `config` and `version` commands.

`botan version`: Print the Botan version number.

`botan config prefix`: If no argument, print the prefix where Botan is installed (such as `/opt` or `/usr/local`).

`botan config cflags`: Print options that should be passed to the compiler whenever a C++ file is compiled. Typically this is used for setting include paths.

`botan config libs`: Print options for which libraries to link to (this will include a reference to the botan library itself).

Your `Makefile` can run `botan config` and get the options necessary for getting your application to compile and link, regardless of whatever crazy libraries Botan might be linked against.

### Windows

No special help exists for building applications on Windows. However, given that typically Windows software is distributed as binaries, this is less of a problem - only the developer needs to worry about it. As long as they can remember where they installed Botan, they just have to set the appropriate flags in their Makefile/project file.

### CMake

Starting in Botan 3.3.0 we provide a `botan-config.cmake` module to discover the installed library binaries and headers. This hooks into CMake’s `find_package()` and comes with common features like version detection. Also, library consumers may specify which botan modules they require in `find_package()`.

Examples:

    find_package(Botan 3.3.0)
    find_package(Botan 3.3.0 COMPONENTS rsa ecdsa tls13)
    find_package(Botan 3.3.0 OPTIONAL_COMPONENTS tls13_pqc)

## Language Wrappers

### Building the Python wrappers

The Python wrappers for Botan use ctypes and the C89 API so no special build step is required, just import botan3.py

See Python Bindings for more information about the Python bindings.

## Minimized Builds

Many developers wish to configure a minimized build which contains only the specific features their application will use. In general this is straightforward: use `--minimized-build` plus `--enable-modules=` to enable the specific modules you wish to use. It is possible to use an asterisk (`*`) as a wildcard for related modules. For instance to enable all available AES implementations, use `--enable-modules='aes*'` which will enable `aes_ni`, `aes_power8`, etc. Any such configurations should build and pass the tests; if you encounter a case where it doesn’t please file an issue.

The only trick is knowing which features you want to enable. The most common difficulty comes with entropy sources. By default, none are enabled, which means if you attempt to use `AutoSeeded_RNG`, it will fail. The easiest resolution is to also enable `system_rng` which can act as either an entropy source or used directly as the RNG.

If you are building for x86, ARM, or POWER, it can be beneficial to enable hardware support for the relevant instruction sets with modules such as `aes_ni` and `clmul` for x86, or `aes_armv8`, `pmull`, and `sha2_32_armv8` on ARMv8. SIMD optimizations such as `chacha_avx2` also can provide substantial performance improvements.

Note

In a future release, hardware specific modules will be enabled by default if the underlying “base” module is enabled.

If you are building a TLS application, you may (or may not) want to include `tls_cbc` which enables support for CBC ciphersuites. If `tls_cbc` is disabled, then it will not be possible to negotiate TLS v1.0/v1.1. In general this should be considered a feature; only enable this if you need backward compatibility with obsolete clients or servers.

For TLS another useful feature which is not enabled by default is the ChaCha20Poly1305 ciphersuites. To enable these, add `chacha20poly1305`.

## Configure Script Options

### `--cpu=CPU`

Set the target CPU architecture. If not used, the arch of the current system is detected (using Python’s platform module) and used.

### `--os=OS`

Set the target operating system.

### `--cc=COMPILER`

Set the desired build compiler

### `--cc-min-version=MAJOR.MINOR`

Set the minimal version of the target compiler. Use –cc-min-version=0.0 to support all compiler versions. Default is auto detection.

### `--cc-bin=BINARY`

Set path to compiler binary

If not provided, the value of the `CXX` environment variable is used if set.

### `--cc-abi-flags=FLAGS`

Set ABI flags, which for the purposes of this option mean options which should be passed to both the compiler and linker.

### `--cxxflags=FLAGS`

Override all compiler flags. This is equivalent to setting `CXXFLAGS` in the environment.

### `--extra-cxxflags=FLAGS`

Set extra compiler flags, which are appended to the default set. This is useful if you want to set just one or two additional options but leave the normal logic for selecting flags alone.

### `--ldflags=FLAGS`

Set flags to pass to the linker. This is equivalent to setting `LDFLAGS`

### `--ar-command=AR`

Set the path to the tool to use to create static archives (`ar`). This is normally only used for cross-compilation.

If not provided, the value of the `AR` environment variable is used if set.

### `--ar-options=AR_OPTIONS`

Specify the options to pass to `ar`.

If not provided, the value of the `AR_OPTIONS` environment variable is used if set.

### `--msvc-runtime=RT`

Specify the MSVC runtime to use (MT, MD, MTd, or MDd). If not specified, picks either MD or MDd depending on if debug mode is set.

### `--compiler-cache`

Specify a compiler cache (like ccache) to use for each compiler invocation.

### `--with-os-features=FEAT`

Specify an OS feature to enable. See `src/build-data/os` and `doc/os.rst` for more information.

### `--without-os-features=FEAT`

Specify an OS feature to disable.

Warning

One operating system feature that can be disabled using this option is `threads`. Be warned that doing so will disable all support for threads including any locking of internal data structures. Calling the library from multiple threads in such a configuration will lead to data races.

This is intended for use only on targets which truly do not support threads, for example certain baremetal configurations.

### `--enable-experimental-features`

Enable all experimental modules and features. Note that these are unstable and may change or even be removed in future releases. Also note that individual experimental modules can be explicitly enabled using `--enable-modules=MODS`.

### `--disable-experimental-features`

Disable all experimental modules and features. This is the default.

### `--enable-deprecated-features`

Enable all deprecated modules and features. Note that these are scheduled for removal in future releases. This is the default.

### `--disable-deprecated-features`

Disable all deprecated modules and features. Note that individual deprecated modules can be explicitly disabled using `--disable-modules=MODS`.

### `--disable-neon`

Disable use of ARM NEON intrinsics at compile time. This is needed to support certain distributions which still support obsolete ARMv7 cores that don’t support NEON and which, for whatever reason, completely disable support for NEON in their toolchains. For ordinary usage this is not necessary; the NEON using code will be compiled and simply not used if at runtime NEON support cannot be detected. This option is supported only for 32-bit ARM processors; Aarch64 requires NEON and for such targets this option is ignored.

### `--system-cert-bundle=PATH`

Set a path to a file containing one or more trusted CA certificates in PEM format. If not given, some default locations are checked.

### `--with-debug-info`

Include debug symbols.

### `--with-sanitizers`

Enable some default set of sanitizer checks. What exactly is enabled depends on the compiler.

### `--enable-sanitizers=SAN`

Enable specific sanitizers. See `src/build-data/cc` for more information.

### `--without-stack-protector`

Disable stack smashing protections. not recommended

### `--enable-stack-scrubbing`

Enable scrubbing of stack frames that were used for cryptographic calculations on potentially sensitive data. At the moment, this is supported exclusively on GCC 14 and newer.

### `--with-coverage-info`

Add coverage info

### `--disable-shared-library`

Disable building a shared library

### `--disable-static-library`

Disable building static library

### `--optimize-for-size`

Optimize for code size.

### `--no-optimizations`

Disable all optimizations for debugging.

### `--debug-mode`

Enable debug info and disable optimizations

### `--amalgamation`

Use amalgamation to build

### `--name-amalgamation`

Specify an alternative amalgamation file name. By default we use botan_all.

### `--with-build-dir=DIR`

Setup the build in a specified directory instead of `./build`

### `--with-external-includedir=DIR`

Search for includes in this directory. Provide this parameter multiple times to define multiple additional include directories.

### `--with-external-libdir=DIR`

Add DIR to the link path. Provide this parameter multiple times to define multiple additional library link directories.

### `--define-build-macro`

Set a compile-time pre-processor definition (i.e. add a -D… to the compiler invocations). Provide this parameter multiple times to add multiple compile-time definitions. Both KEY=VALUE and KEY (without specific value) are supported.

### `--with-sysroot-dir=DIR`

Use specified dir for system root while cross-compiling

### `--link-method=METHOD`

During build setup a directory linking to each header file is created. Choose how the links are performed (options are “symlink”, “hardlink”, or “copy”).

### `--with-local-config=FILE`

Include the contents of FILE into the generated build.h

### `--distribution-info=STRING`

Set distribution specific version information

### `--maintainer-mode`

A build configuration used by library developers, which enables extra warnings and turns most warnings into errors.

Warning

When this option is used, all relevant warnings available in the most recent release of GCC/Clang are enabled, so it may fail to build if your compiler is not sufficiently recent. In addition there may be non-default configurations or unusual platforms which cause warnings which are converted to errors. Patches addressing such warnings are welcome, but otherwise no support is available when using this option.

### `--werror-mode`

Turns most warnings into errors.

### `--no-install-python-module`

Skip installing Python module.

### `--with-python-versions=N.M`

Where to install botan3.py. By default this is chosen to be the version of Python that is running `configure.py`.

### `--with-valgrind`

Use valgrind API to perform additional checks. Not needed by end users.

### `--unsafe-fuzzer-mode`

Disable essential checks for testing. UNSAFE FOR PRODUCTION

### `--build-fuzzers=TYPE`

Select which interface the fuzzer uses. Options are “afl”, “libfuzzer”, “klee”, or “test”. The “test” mode builds fuzzers that read one input from stdin and then exit.

### `--with-fuzzer-lib=LIB`

Specify an additional library that fuzzer binaries must link with.

### `--build-targets=BUILD_TARGETS`

Build only the specific targets and tools (`static`, `shared`, `cli`, `tests`, `bogo_shim`).

### `--without-documentation`

Skip building/installing documentation

### `--with-sphinx`

Use Sphinx to generate the handbook

### `--with-pdf`

Use Sphinx to generate PDF doc

### `--with-rst2man`

Use rst2man to generate a man page for the CLI

### `--with-doxygen`

Use Doxygen to generate API reference

### `--module-policy=POL`

The option `--module-policy=POL` enables modules required by and disables modules prohibited by a text policy in `src/build-data/policy`. Additional modules can be enabled if not prohibited by the policy. Currently available policies include `bsi`, `nist` and `modern`:

    $ ./configure.py --module-policy=bsi --enable-modules=tls13_pqc,xts

### `--enable-modules=MODS`

Enable some specific modules

### `--disable-modules=MODS`

Disable some specific modules

### `--minimized-build`

Start with the bare minimum. This is mostly useful in conjunction with `--enable-modules` to get a build that has just the features a particular application requires.

### `--with-boost`

Use Boost.Asio for networking support. This primarily affects the command line utils.

### `--with-bzip2`

Enable bzip2 compression

### `--with-lzma`

Enable lzma compression

### `--with-zlib`

Enable using zlib compression

### `--with-commoncrypto`

Enable using CommonCrypto for certain operations

### `--with-sqlite3`

Enable using sqlite3 for data storage

### `--with-tpm`

Enable support for TPM 1.2

### `--with-tpm2`

Enable support for TPM 2.0

### `--program-suffix=SUFFIX`

A string to append to all program binaries.

### `--library-suffix=SUFFIX`

A string to append to all library names.

### `--prefix=DIR`

Set the install prefix.

### `--docdir=DIR`

Set the documentation installation dir.

### `--bindir=DIR`

Set the binary installation dir.

### `--libdir=DIR`

Set the library installation dir.

### `--mandir=DIR`

Set the man page installation dir.

### `--includedir=DIR`

Set the include file installation dir.

### `--without-include-namespace`

By default, the header files (e.g. `botan/hex.h`) are installed into an additional subdirectory named `botan-<version>`. This option causes them to be installed directly into `<includedir>` instead.

This option is not needed for normal usage and is only required in order to work around limitations in certain package managers.

### `--cmakeconfigdir=DIR`

Set the CMake config (botan-config.cmake, botan-config-version.cmake) installation dir. Defaults to `<libdir>/cmake/Botan-<version>`.

### `--list-modules`

List all modules that could be enabled or disabled using –enable-modules or –disable-modules.