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Building

Table of contents

1. Building Frida
   • Prerequisites
   • Getting the code
   • Building for the native machine
   • Building for a different machine
   • Building out-of-tree

Building Frida

Prerequisites

You need:

• C/C++ toolchain
• Node.js >= 18
• Git

For example on an Ubuntu system:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential git lib32stdc++-9-dev \
    libc6-dev-i386 nodejs npm

Getting the code

$ git clone https://github.com/frida/frida.git

Building for the native machine

To build, run:

$ make

Which will use ./build as the build directory. Run make install to install.

You may also do ./configure first to specify a --prefix, or any other options. Use --help to list the top-level options.

For setting lower level options, do:

$ ./configure -- first-option second-option …

The options after -- are passed directly to Meson’s setup command. This means you can also pass project options to subprojects, e.g.:

$ ./configure -- \
    -Dfrida-gum:devkits=gum,gumjs \
    -Dfrida-core:devkits=core

Consult meson.options in subprojects/* for available options. You may also clone the different repos standalone and build the same way as described here.

Building for a different machine

iOS/watchOS/tvOS

$ ./configure --host=ios-arm64
# or: ./configure --host=watchos-arm64
# or: ./configure --host=tvos-arm64
# optionally suffixed by `-simulator`
$ make

Android

$ ./configure --host=android-arm64
$ make

Raspberry Pi

$ sudo apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf
$ ./configure --host=arm-linux-gnueabihf
$ make

Building out-of-tree

Sometimes you may want to use a single source tree to build for multiple systems or configurations. To do this, invoke configure from an empty directory outside the source tree:

$ mkdir build-ios
$ ../frida/configure --host=ios-arm64
$ make
$ cd ..
$ mkdir build-android
$ ../frida/configure --host=android-arm64
$ make

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