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Developer's Guide

Catalog of Dependencies

The following is a list of dependencies, in no particular order. This guide includes instructions for obtaining many of these at the relevant step(s). You may not need all of these, depending on which portions you are building or developing.

There are many, many others automatically downloaded by Gradle from Maven Central and Bintray JCenter when building and/or setting up the development environment. If you need these offline, a reasonable course of action is to set up a development environment online, perhaps perform a build, and then scrape Gradle's cache.

Install Development and Build Tools

If you're on Windows, install Git, MinGW, Bison, and Flex. Many of the commands given below must be executed in Bash (Use git-bash or MSYS from MinGW). IMPORTANT: The bison and flex executables may be named win-bison.exe and win-flex.exe. Our build cannot currently cope with that, so you should rename them to bison.exe and flex.exe.

Install OpenJDK 11 and make sure it's the default java.

Install Eclipse. You can launch Eclipse with any JRE/JDK, but you'll need to ensure Eclipse knows about your JDK 11 installation. In Eclipse, select Window -> Prefereces (Eclipse -> Preferences on macOS), then navigate to Java -> Installed JREs, and ensure a JDK 11 is configured.

Install Gradle, add it to your PATH, and ensure it is launched using JDK 11.

Setup Source and Dependency Repositories

You may choose any directory for your working copy, but these instructions will assume you have cloned the source to ~/git/ghidra. Be sure to adjust the commands to match your chosen working directory if different than suggested:

mkdir ~/git
cd ~/git
git clone git@github.com:NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra.git

Ghidra's build uses artifacts named as available in Maven Central and Bintray JCenter, when possible. Unfortunately, in some cases, the artifact or the particular version we desire is not available. So, in addition to mavenCentral and jcenter, you must configure a flatDir-style repository for manually-downloaded dependencies.

Create ~/.gradle/init.d/repos.gradle with the following contents:

ext.HOME = System.getProperty('user.home')

allprojects {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
        jcenter()
        flatDir name:'flat', dirs:["$HOME/flatRepo"]
    }
}

Create the ~/flatRepo folder to hold the manually-downloaded dependencies:

mkdir ~/flatRepo

If you prefer not to modify your user-wide Gradle configuration, you may use Gradle's other init script facilities, but you're on your own.

Get Dependencies for FileFormats:

Download dex-tools-2.0.zip from the dex2jar project's releases page on GitHub. Unpack the dex-*.jar files from the lib directory to ~/flatRepo:

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -OL https://github.com/pxb1988/dex2jar/releases/download/2.0/dex-tools-2.0.zip
unzip dex-tools-2.0.zip
cp dex2jar-2.0/lib/dex-*.jar ~/flatRepo/

Download AXMLPrinter2.jar from the "android4me" archive on code.google.com. Place it in ~/flatRepo:

cd ~/flatRepo
curl -OL https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/android4me/AXMLPrinter2.jar

Get Dependencies for DMG:

Download hfsexplorer-0_21-bin.zip from www.catacombae.org. Unpack the lib directory to ~/flatRepo.:

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -OL https://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/files/HFSExplorer/0.21/hfsexplorer-0_21-bin.zip
mkdir hfsx
cd hfsx
unzip ../hfsexplorer-0_21-bin.zip
cd lib
cp csframework.jar hfsx_dmglib.jar hfsx.jar iharder-base64.jar ~/flatRepo/

Import Gradle Project

If you want just to build Ghidra, you may skip ahead to Building Ghidra. Otherwise, import Ghidra into Eclipse using the integrated BuildShip plugin. Select File -> Import, expand Gradle, and select "Existing Gradle Project." Select the root of the source repo as the root Gradle project. Be sure to select Gradle 5.0, or point it at your local installation. You may see build path errors until the environment is properly prepared, as described below.

Alternatively, you may have Gradle generate the Eclipse projects and import those instead. This is the way to go if you'd prefer not to activate Gradle's BuildShip plugin. From the project root:

gradle eclipse

Select File -> Import, expand General, and select "Existing Projects into Workspace." Select the root of the source repo, and select "Search for nested projects." Select all, and Finish. You may see build path errors until the environment is properly prepared, as described below.

Prepare the Environment

From the project root, execute:

gradle prepDev -x yajswDevUnpack eclipse

The prepDev tasks primarily include generating some source, indexing our built-in help, and unpacking some dependencies. Regarding yajswDevUnpack, please see the relevant sections on GhidraServer below. For now, we exclude the unpack task.

Optionally, to pre-compile all the language modules, you may also execute:

gradle sleighCompile

Refresh the projects in Eclipse. You should not see any errors at this point, and you can accomplish many development tasks. However, some features of Ghidra will not be functional until further steps are taken.

Building the natives

Some of Ghidra's components are built for the native platform. We currently support Linux, macOS, and Windows 64-bit x86 systems. Others should be possible, but we do not test on them.

Ensure bison and flex are installed and in your PATH. Now build using Gradle:

On Linux:

gradle buildNatives_linux64

On macOS:

gradle buildNatives_osx64

On Windows:

gradle buildNatives_win64

This will build the decompiler, the demangler for GNU toolchains, the sleigh compiler, and (on Windows only) the PDB parser.

Run Ghidra from Eclipse

To run or debug Ghidra from Eclipse, use the provided launch configuration (usually under the "Run" or "Debug" buttons). If the launcher does not appear, it probably has not been marked as a favorite. Click the dropdown next to the "Run" button and select "Run Configurations." Then expand "Java Application" on the left to find the "Ghidra" launcher.

Building Ghidra

To build the full Ghidra distribution, you must also build the GhidraServer.

Get Dependencies for GhidraServer

Building the GhidraServer requires "Yet another Java service wrapper" (yajsw) version 12.12. Download yajsw-stable-12.12.zip from their project on www.sourceforge.net, and place it in a directory named: ghidra.bin/Ghidra/Features/GhidraServer/. Note that ghidra.bin must be a sibling of ghidra:

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -OL https://sourceforge.net/projects/yajsw/files/yajsw/yajsw-stable-12.12/yajsw-stable-12.12.zip
mkdir -p ~/git/ghidra.bin/Ghidra/Features/GhidraServer/
cp ~/Downloads/yajsw-stable-12.12.zip ~/git/ghidra.bin/Ghidra/Features/GhidraServer/

Use Gradle to unpack the wrapper for development. From your clone:

gradle yajswDevUnpack

Building the Package

Before building, you may want to update the version and release name. These properties are kept in Ghidra/application.properties.

If you want it included, you must also build the GhidraDevPlugin module first. Some supporting data will also be missing. See the sections below for instructions to produce these components. You may also be able to copy some of this data from a previous official distribution.

To build the full package, use Gradle:

gradle buildGhidra

The output will be placed in build/dist/. It will be named according to the version, release name, build date, and platform. To test it, unzip it where you like, and execute ./ghidraRun.

Building Supporting Data

Some features of Ghidra require the curation of rather extensive data bases. These include the Data Type Archives and Function ID Databases, both of which require collecting header files and libraries for the relevant SDKs and platforms. Much of this work is done by hand. The archives included in our official builds can be found in the ghidra-data repository.

Building Data Type Archives

This task is often done manually from the Ghidra GUI, and the archives included in our official build require a fair bit of fine tuning. From a CodeBrowser window, select File -> Parse C Source. From here you can create and configure parsing profiles, which lists headers and pre-processor options. Then, click "Parse to File" to create the Data Type Archive. The result can be added to an installation or source tree by copying it to Ghidra/Features/Base/data/typeinfo.

Building FID Databases

This task is often done manually from the Ghidra GUI, and the archives included in our official build require a fair bit of fine tuning. You will first need to import the relevant libraries from which you'd like to produce a FID database. This is often a set of libraries from an SDK. We include a variety of Visual Studio platforms in the official build.

From a CodeBrowser window, select File -> Configure. Enable the "Function ID" plugins, and close the dialog. Now, from the CodeBrowser window, select Tools -> Function ID -> Create new empty FidDb. Choose a destination file. Now, select Tools -> Function ID -> Populate FidDb from programs. Fill out the options appropriately and click OK.

If you'd like some details of our fine tuning, take a look at Ghidra/Features/FunctionID/building_fid.txt.

Developing / Building the GhidraDev Plugin

First, install the Eclipse Plugin Development Environment (PDE). By default, the GhidraDev project is excluded from the build. To enable it, uncomment it in settings.gradle.

${EDITOR:-vi} settings.gradle

You will need some additional runtime dependencies:

Get Dependencies for GhidraDev

Building the GhidraDev plugin for Eclipse requires the CDT and PyDev plugins for Eclipse. Download cdt-8.6.0.zip from The Eclipse Foundation, and place it in a directory named: ghidra.bin/GhidraBuild/EclipsePlugins/GhidraDev/buildDependencies/. Note that ghidra.bin must be a sibling of ghidra.

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -OL 'http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?r=1&protocol=https&file=/tools/cdt/releases/8.6/cdt-8.6.0.zip'
curl -o 'cdt-8.6.0.zip.sha512' -L --retry 3 'http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/sums.php?type=sha512&file=/tools/cdt/releases/8.6/cdt-8.6.0.zip'
sha512sum -c 'cdt-8.6.0.zip.sha512'
mkdir -p ~/git/ghidra.bin/GhidraBuild/EclipsePlugins/GhidraDev/buildDependencies/
cp ~/Downloads/cdt-8.6.0.zip ~/git/ghidra.bin/GhidraBuild/EclipsePlugins/GhidraDev/buildDependencies/

Download PyDev 6.3.1.zip from www.pydev.org, and place it in the same directory:

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -OL https://sourceforge.net/projects/pydev/files/pydev/PyDev%206.3.1/PyDev%206.3.1.zip
cp ~/Downloads/'PyDev 6.3.1.zip' ~/git/ghidra.bin/GhidraBuild/EclipsePlugins/GhidraDev/buildDependencies/

Use Gradle to unpack the dependencies. Note that these tasks will not work until you enable the GhidraDev project in settings.gradle. From your clone:

gradle cdtUnpack pyDevUnpack

Import the GhidraDev Project

If you're using BuildShip, simply refresh the Gradle project in Eclipse. If you're not using BuildShip, re-run gradle eclipse and import the new project.