Build from source

Tenzir uses CMake as build system. Aside from a modern C++20 compiler, you need to ensure availability of the dependencies in the table below.

Deterministic Builds via Nix

We provide a Nix flake to setup an environment in which all dependencies are available. Run nix develop inside the main source directory. You can also delegate the entire build process to Nix by invoking nix build, but be aware that this method does not support incremental builds.

Dependencies

Every release of Tenzir includes an SBOM in SPDX format that lists all dependencies and their versions.

Latest SBOM

Required	Dependency	Version	Description
✓	C++ Compiler	C++20 required	Tenzir is tested to compile with GCC >= 12.0 and Clang >= 15.0.
✓	CMake	>= 3.19	Cross-platform tool for building, testing and packaging software.
✓	CAF	>= 0.18.7	Implementation of the actor model in C++. (Bundled as submodule.)
✓	OpenSSL		Utilities for secure networking and cryptography.
✓	FlatBuffers	>= 2.0.8	Memory-efficient cross-platform serialization library.
✓	Boost	>= 1.81.0	Required as a general utility library.
✓	Apache Arrow	>= 13.0.0	Required for in-memory data representation. Must be built with Compute, Filesystem, S3, Zstd and Parquet enabled. For the gcs plugin, GCS needs to be enabled.
✓	re2		Required for regular expressione evaluation.
✓	yaml-cpp	>= 0.6.2	Required for reading YAML configuration files.
✓	simdjson	>= 3.1.0	Required for high-performance JSON parsing. (Bundled as submodule.)
✓	spdlog	>= 1.5	Required for logging.
✓	fmt	>= 8.1.1	Required for formatted text output.
✓	xxHash	>= 0.8.0	Required for computing fast hash digests.
✓	robin-map	>= 0.6.3	Fast hash map and hash set using robin hood hashing. (Bundled as subtree.)
✓	fast_float	>= 3.2.0	Required for parsing floating point numbers. (Bundled as submodule.)
✓	libmaxminddb	>= 1.8.0	Required for the geoip context.
	libpcap		Required for building the pcap plugin.
	librdkafka		Required for building the kafka plugin.
	http-parser		Required for building the web plugin.
	cppzmq		Required for building the zmq plugin.
	pfs		Required for the processes and sockets operators on Linux.
	Protocol Buffers	>= 1.4.1	Required for building the velociraptor plugin.
	gRPC	>= 1.51	Required for building the velociraptor plugin.
	rabbitmq-c		Required for building the rabbitmq plugin.
	yara	>= 4.4.0	Required for building the yara plugin.
	poetry		Required for building the Python bindings.
	Doxygen		Required to build documentation for libtenzir.
	Pandoc		Required to build the manpage for Tenzir.
	bash	>= 4.0.0	Required to run the integration tests.
	bats	>= 1.8.0	Required to run the integration tests.
	uv	>= 0.2.17	Required to run the python operator.

The minimum specified versions reflect those versions that we use in CI and manual testing. Older versions may still work in select cases.

macOS

On macOS, we recommend using Clang from the Homebrew llvm@17 package with the following settings:

export LLVM_PREFIX="$(brew --prefix llvm@17)"
export PATH="${LLVM_PREFIX}/bin:${PATH}"
export CC="${LLVM_PREFIX}/bin/clang"
export CXX="${LLVM_PREFIX}/bin/clang++"
export LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,${LLVM_PREFIX} ${LDFLAGS}"
export CPPFLAGS="-isystem ${LLVM_PREFIX}/include ${CPPFLAGS}"
export CXXFLAGS="-isystem ${LLVM_PREFIX}/include/c++/v1 ${CXXFLAGS}"

Installing via CMake on macOS configures a launchd agent to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.tenzir.tenzir.plist. Use launchctl to spawn a node at login:

# To unload the agent, replace 'load' with 'unload'.
launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.tenzir.tenzir.plist

Compile

Building Tenzir involves the following steps:

Clone the repository recursively:

git clone https://github.com/tenzir/tenzir
cd tenzir
git submodule update --init --recursive -- libtenzir plugins

Configure the build with CMake. For faster builds, we recommend passing -G Ninja to cmake.

cmake -B build
# CMake defaults to a "Debug" build. When performance matters, use "Release"
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release  

Optionally, you can use the CMake TUI to visually configure the build:

ccmake build

The source tree also contains a set of CMake presets that combine various configuration options into curated build flavors. You can list them with:

cmake --list-presets

Build the executable:

cmake --build build --target all

Test

After you have built the executable, run the unit and integration tests to verify that your build works as expected:

Run component-level unit tests:

ctest --test-dir build

Run the "black box" integration tests:

cmake --build build --target integration

Run end-to-end integration tests:

cmake --build build --target integration

Install

Install Tenzir system-wide:

cmake --install build

If you prefer to install into a custom install prefix, install with --prefix /path/to/install/prefix.

To remove debug symbols from the installed binaries and libraries, pass --strip.

To install only files relevant for running Tenzir and not for plugin development pass --component Runtime.

Clean

In case you want to make changes to your build environment, we recommend deleting the build tree entirely:

rm -rf build

This avoids subtle configuration glitches of transitive dependencies. For example, CMake doesn't disable assertions when switching from a Debug to a Release build, but would do so when starting with a fresh build of type Release.