Source tarballs

✓ These tarballs should be reproducible, meaning you should be able to generate distributables that match the official releases.

This assumes an Ubuntu (x86_64) host, but it should not be too hard to adapt to another similar system.

We distribute two tarballs, a "normal" one (the default, recommended for users), and a strictly source-only one (for Linux distro packagers). The normal tarball, in addition to including everything from the source-only one, also includes:

• compiled (.mo) locale files (in addition to source .po locale files)
• compiled (_pb2.py) protobuf files (in addition to source .proto files)
• the packages/ folder containing source-only pure-python runtime dependencies

Build steps

1. Install Docker

   See contrib/docker_notes.md.

   (worth reading even if you already have docker)

2. Build tarball

   (set envvar OMIT_UNCLEAN_FILES=1 to build the "source-only" tarball)

   $ ./build.sh

   If you want reproducibility, try instead e.g.:

   $ ELECBUILD_COMMIT=HEAD ELECBUILD_NOCACHE=1 ./build.sh
   $ ELECBUILD_COMMIT=HEAD ELECBUILD_NOCACHE=1 OMIT_UNCLEAN_FILES=1 ./build.sh

3. The generated distributables are in ./dist.

Differences between the sourceonly vs "normal" tar.gz

These scripts can either build a source-only or a "normal" tarball. The official release process builds both.

The source-only tarball is aimed at Linux distro packagers. Users wanting to run from source should typically use the normal tarball.

The differences are as follows:

• the normal tarball bundles all the pure-python dependencies of Electrum. These are placed into the packages/ folder, and they are automatically found and used at runtime.
• the normal tarball includes compiled (.mo) locale files, the source-only tarball does not. Both tarballs contain (.po) source locale files. If you are packaging for a Linux distro, you probably want to compile the .mo locale files yourself (see contrib/locale/build_locale.sh).
• the normal tarball includes generated *_pb2.py files. These are created using protobuf-compiler from .proto files (see contrib/generate_payreqpb2.sh)