NASM - The Netwide Assembler

Appendix D: Building NASM from Source

The source code for NASM is available from our website, http://wwww.nasm.us/, see section E.1.

D.1 Building from a Source Archive

The source archives available on the web site should be capable of building on a number of platforms. This is the recommended method for building NASM to support platforms for which executables are not available.

On a system which has Unix shell (sh), run:

     sh configure 
     make everything

A number of options can be passed to configure; see sh configure --help.

A set of Makefiles for some other environments are also available; please see the file Mkfiles/README.

To build the installer for the Windows platform, you will need the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer, NSIS, installed.

To build the documentation, you will need a set of additional tools. The documentation is not likely to be able to build on non-Unix systems.

D.2 Building from the git Repository

The NASM development tree is kept in a source code repository using the git distributed source control system. The link is available on the website. This is recommended only to participate in the development of NASM or to assist with testing the development code.

To build NASM from the git repository you will need a Perl interpreter and, if building on a Unix system, GNU autoconf installed on your system.

To build on a Unix system, run:

     sh autogen.sh

to create the configure script and then build as listed above.

D.3 Building the documentation

To build the documentation, you will need a Perl interpreter, a Postscript to PDF converter such as Ghostscript, and suitable fonts installed on your system. The recommended (and default) fonts are Adobe's Source Sans and Source Code fonts, which are freely available under the SIL Open Font License.