Installation: Building From Source

Building from source is advisable generally when you need features that exist in our source that are not in a package. Otherwise, installing from a package is the easiest and most stable way to get up and running.

Requirements

• An x86_64 system
• Several GB of RAM
• MacOS:
  • Sierra or High Sierra
  • Clang from Xcode Command Line Tools
• Linux:
  • GCC 5 or GCC 7
  • we only actively support building on distributions we create binary packages for; your mileage may vary on other systems

We only support building with the bundled OCaml; you may need to uninstall (or brew unlink on Mac) other ocamlc and ocamlbuild binaries before building HHVM.

GCC 5

If your Linux-based system comes with an earlier GCC, you must build GCC and G++; we script a minimal build for several of our binary packages.

HHVM might build with GCC 4.9, however:

• we are no longer testing this
• HHVM is known to trigger optimization bugs in GCC 4.9

Installing Build Dependencies

Debian or Ubuntu

If you haven't already added our apt repositories (e.g. to install binary packages):

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install software-properties-common apt-transport-https
$ apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 0xB4112585D386EB94

To install the build dependencies:

$ add-apt-repository -s https://dl.hhvm.com/debian
# - or - #
$ add-apt-repository -s https://dl.hhvm.com/ubuntu

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get build-dep hhvm-nightly

Homebrew

$ brew tap hhvm/hhvm
$ brew deps --include-build hhvm | xargs brew install

Other Distributions

It's best to obtain the dependency list from our nightly packaging system, to ensure you're using an up-to-date list; to do this, search https://github.com/hhvm/packaging/ for Build-Depends:

Downloading the HHVM source-code

git clone git://github.com/facebook/hhvm.git
cd hhvm
git submodule update --init --recursive

Building HHVM

This will take a long time.

cmake -DMYSQL_UNIX_SOCK_ADDR=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock .
make -j [number_of_processor_cores] # eg. make -j 4
sudo make install

Custom GCC

If you have built your own GCC, you will need to pass additional options to cmake:

-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/path/to/gcc -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/path/to/g++ -DSTATIC_CXX_LIB=On

MacOS

It's fairly common in some environments to work around opendirectoryd issues by scheduling a cronjob to kill it; if you're doing this, disable it before building HHVM, or you are likely to get misleading errors such as /bin/sh: /bin/sh: cannot execute binary file in the middle of the build.

Even when building HHVM from source, it's easiest to use brew to manage the build environment:

$ brew sh

brew sh will drop you into a bash shell in a normalized build environment - e.g. PATH will be set to include common build tools.

Inside this shell:

# Several of our dependencies are not linked into standard places...

# ... some of the `brew sh` wrappers will remove CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS that reference undeclared dependencies
export HOMEBREW_DEPENDENCIES="$(brew deps --include-build hhvm | paste -s -d , -)"
# ... some of those use pkg-config, and we need to tell it where to look:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$(echo "$HOMEBREW_DEPENDENCIES" | tr ',' "\n" | xargs brew --prefix | sed 's,$,/lib/pkgconfig,' | paste -s -d : -)"
# ... for others, CMake directly looks for specific files, and we need to tell it where to look too:
export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$(echo "$HOMEBREW_DEPENDENCIES" | tr ',' "\n" | xargs brew --prefix | paste -s -d : -)"

# Configure.
# - If you install MySQL server from Homebrew, it uses /tmp/mysql.sock as the unix socket by default
# - set installation prefix for installing side-by-side with homebrew versions (optional)
cmake . \
  -DMYSQL_UNIX_SOCK_ADDR=/tmp/mysql.sock \
  $(brew diy --name=hhvm-local --version=$(date +%Y.%m.%d))
make # you probably want `make -j<number of cores`, e.g. `make -j12`
make install

Running programs

The installed hhvm binary can be found in /usr/local/bin.

Errors

If any errors occur, you may have to remove the CMakeCache.txt file in the checkout.

If your failure was on the make command, try to correct the error and run make again, it should restart from the point it stops. If the error persists, try to remove as explained above.

Running Tests

If you want to run the regression tests, you will first need to install some locales. These locales should be sufficient, although may be more than are actually needed:

  sudo locale-gen en_EN
  sudo locale-gen en_UK
  sudo locale-gen en_US
  sudo locale-gen en_GB
  sudo locale-gen de_DE
  sudo locale-gen fr_FR
  sudo locale-gen fa_IR
  sudo locale-gen zh_CN.utf8
  sudo locale-gen zh_CN

There are 2 families of regression tests. There are about 5000 tests in all. All tests should pass. It takes about 100 CPU minutes to run them all, but the test runner will run them in parallel, using 1 thread per core:

  pushd hphp
    test/run quick
    test/run slow
  popd