Version 1.11.1-3 is a maintenance release, built with the lates tools.

The xPack Ninja Build is a standalone cross-platform binary distribution of Ninja Build.

There are separate binaries for Windows (x64), macOS (x64, arm64) and GNU/Linux (x64, arm64 and arm).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • x64 GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 or later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • arm64/arm GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 or later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • x64 Windows: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10
  • x64 macOS: 10.13 or later
  • arm64 macOS: 11.6 or later

Install

The full details of installing the xPack Ninja Build on various platforms are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install Ninja Build is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/ninja-build from the npmjs.com registry.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a development dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Add a package.json if not already present

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/ninja-build@latest --verbose

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/ninja-build@1.11.1-3.1 --verbose

It is also possible to install Meson Build globally, in the user home folder, but this requires xPack aware tools to automatically identify them and manage paths.

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/ninja-build@latest --verbose

Uninstall

To remove the links created by xpm in the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/ninja-build

To completely remove the package from the central xPack store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/ninja-build

Compliance

The xPack Ninja Build generally follows the official Ninja Build releases.

The current version is based on:

  • Ninja Build version 1.11.1 from 30 Aug 2022.

Changes

Compared to the upstream version, the Windows version also supports spawning scripts via cmd.exe /c. These scripts are used by npm/xpm to redirect invocations to the central packages repository.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • none

Shared libraries

On all platforms the packages are standalone, and expect only the standard runtime to be present on the host.

All dependencies that are build as shared libraries are copied locally in the libexec folder (or in the same folder as the executable for Windows).

DT_RPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On GNU/Linux the binaries are adjusted to use a relative path:

$ readelf -d library.so | grep runpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]

In the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RPATH has the highest priority, higher than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it should not interfere with the xPack binaries.

Please note that previous versions, up to mid-2020, used DT_RUNPATH, which has a priority lower than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and does not tolerate setting it in the environment.

@rpath and @loader_path

Similarly, on macOS, the binaries are adjusted with install_name_tool to use a relative path.

Documentation

The original documentation is available online.

Build

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the How to build page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests

TBD

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

4413f1743393c537e0fdad52aa85e2edd4d04bae1e26c05b42501017520d3bbe
xpack-ninja-build-1.11.1-3-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

fe9b6ffbcfc5898dc155025d3401cad6f0bf61bae11b32b8c825d3f6ead339fc
xpack-ninja-build-1.11.1-3-darwin-x64.tar.gz

336bcd6d98c77713c7623f8f1b353b5f573e6b6d8156ee183e3083a944258a39
xpack-ninja-build-1.11.1-3-linux-arm.tar.gz

a1db9d23ae0c4bd330162aecf43f9bc15d31d741001c92d51e289c37bad25a02
xpack-ninja-build-1.11.1-3-linux-arm64.tar.gz

e14b37987b1681d86661db41830623b3c8e67714610006db9199e50c22f2a4ad
xpack-ninja-build-1.11.1-3-linux-x64.tar.gz

35cb9bdcf0022584366ad6c15badf1441671c8e3343512b9f32b101cb36b4bc6
xpack-ninja-build-1.11.1-3-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit x86 GNU/Linux and x86 Windows was dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm GNU/Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

GNU/Linux minimum requirements

Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022 and the minimum requirement was raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8.

Pre-deprecation notice for Ubuntu 18.04

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver reached the end of the standard five-year maintenance window for Long-Term Support (LTS) release on 31 May 2023.

As a courtesy, the xPack GNU/Linux releases will continue to be based on Ubuntu 18.04 for another year.

From 2025 onwards, the GNU/Linux binaries will be built on Debian 10, (GLIBC 2.28), and are also expected to run on RedHat 8.

Users are urged to update their build and test infrastructure to ensure a smooth transition to the next xPack releases.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.