How to build Julia from source?

Question

I have a fork (or a feature branch) of the core Julia Language and I want to build the code into an actual language I can use and test out. How do I build Julia from source to test my change?

Answer 1

Per the JuliaLang repo's README:

1. Download the required dependancies from here: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/doc/build/build.md#required-build-tools-and-external-libraries
2. Clone the git repo from here: git clone https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia.git (or the link to your fork)
3. Checkout the specific branch or tag you want to use/build by doing git checkout v1.8.2 for example.
4. Change directory into the folder you cloned down.
5. Then, from in the directory, run the make command.

Note: The build process will fail badly if any of the build directory's parent directories have spaces or other shell meta-characters such as $ or : in their names (this is due to a limitation in GNU make). Once it is built, you can run the julia executable after you enter your julia directory and run ./julia

Then you can run the tests for Julia by typing make testall and observing the output. Find out more in the Getting Started manual.