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Contribution guide

Prepare environments​

For all platforms​

These are the build tools you need to install in your local dev environment

  • Node.js >= 16, for running Node.js

  • Rust follow rustup for installation, for building rust code

  • Pnpm, a Node.js package manager that llama-node used. We only define Node.js workspaces in pnpm format.

  • CMake, for building c++ backends.

For Linux​

Here we use Ubuntu as an example. For users of other Linux distributions, please install similar tools for your respective distribution.

  • GCC, for compiling C/C++ code

    Ubuntu/Debian user can use apt install build-essential

  • Musl tool, for cross compile musl libc on GCC

    Ubuntu/Debian user can use apt install musl-tools

For Mac​

  • XCode, for compiling C/C++ code

For Windows​

Cross compilation​

Cross compilation has a lot of tricks and magics. You may encounter issues that cannot be found in this documentation or even through online research. If you cannot handle it properly, please contact llama-node maintainers for help.

We added cross compilation on OSX environment, which enable MacOS users to compile both x64 and aarch64(ARM) programs.

We also provide cross compilation on Linux environment, but that one only compiles for both x64-gcc and x64-musl which served for different libc containers.

For Mac​

Please add rust target aarch64 on x64 system, or x64 target on aarch64 system.

# run this on x86-64 MacOS
rustup target add aarch64-apple-darwin
# run this on aarch64 MacOS
rustup target add x86_64-apple-darwin

For Linux​

Here we use x86-64 Ubuntu (which provides Glibc/GCC as default standard C compilation) as an example. For users of other Linux distributions, please install targets for your respective distribution.

rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Prepare codebase​

  • Initialize submodules

    git submodule update --init --recursive

  • Install Node.js dependencies

    Here we use --ignore-scripts flags for the first time installation to avoid some preinstall scripts error

    pnpm install --ignore-scripts

Build backends​

  • Build for llama-cpp

    pnpm build:llama-cpp

  • Build for llm-rs

    pnpm build:llm-rs

  • Build for rwkv-cpp

    pnpm build:rwkv-cpp

Build Typescript wrapper​

pnpm build