Building on Mac OS X is as easy as downloading the code and building the Xcode project or workspace:

Preliminaries

• XCode 4.3 or newer requires the "Command Line Tools" component (XCode->Preferences->Downloads->Components).
• Mac OS X Lion or newer requires installing Swig.

Building LLDB

• Download the lldb sources.
• Follow the code signing instructions in lldb/docs/code-signing.txt
• In Xcode 3.x: lldb/lldb.xcodeproj, select the lldb-tool target, and build.
• In Xcode 4.x: lldb/lldb.xcworkspace, select the lldb-tool scheme, and build.

This document describes the steps needed to compile LLDB on most Linux systems.

Preliminaries

LLDB relies on many of the technologies developed by the larger LLVM project. In particular, it requires both Clang and LLVM itself in order to build. Due to this tight integration the Getting Started guides for both of these projects come as prerequisite reading:

• LLVM
• Clang

In addition to any dependencies required by LLVM and Clang, LLDB needs a few development packages that may also need to be installed depending on your system. The current list of dependencies are:

• Swig
• libedit
• Python

So for example, on a Fedora system one might run:

> yum install swig python-devel libedit-devel

On an Ubuntu system one might run:

> sudo apt-get install swig python-dev libedit-dev

If building using GCC instead of Clang, GCC 4.6.2 or newer is required.

• GCC

Building LLDB

We first need to checkout the source trees into the appropriate locations. Both Clang and LLDB build as subprojects of LLVM. This means we will be checking out the source for both Clang and LLDB into the tools subdirectory of LLVM. We will be setting up a directory hierarchy looking something like this:

  
                  llvm
                  |
                  `-- tools
                      |
                      +-- clang
                      |
                      `-- lldb
                

For reference, we will call the root of the LLVM project tree $llvm, and the roots of the Clang and LLDB source trees $clang and $lldb respectively.

Change to the directory where you want to do development work and checkout LLVM:

> svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk llvm

Now switch to LLVM’s tools subdirectory and checkout both Clang and LLDB:

> cd $llvm/tools
> svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/cfe/trunk clang
> svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/lldb/trunk lldb

In general, building the LLDB trunk revision requires trunk revisions of both LLVM and Clang.

It is highly recommended that you build the system out of tree. Create a second build directory and configure the LLVM project tree to your specifications as outlined in LLVM’s Getting Started Guide. A typical build procedure might be:

> cd $llvm/..
> mkdir build
> cd build
> $llvm/configure --enable-cxx11 --enable-libcpp
> make

Note that once both LLVM and Clang have been configured and built it is not necessary to perform a top-level make to rebuild changes made only to LLDB. You can run make from the build/tools/lldb subdirectory as well. If your compiler doesn't support libc++, you may need to tweak or remove the last parameter to the configure script.

Additional Notes

LLDB has a Python scripting capability and supplies its own Python module, lldb, built alongside the lldb binary. Python needs to know where to look for this module when LLDB starts up. To tell python the location of LLDB, set PYTHONPATH environment variable.

In bash with a Debug+Asserts build (the default if configure is invoked like in the example on this page) one might run:

> export PYTHONPATH=$llvm/build/Debug+Asserts/lib/python2.7/site-packages

If you used different configure flags, or have a different version of python, you may need to adjust the above to suit your needs. To test that the lldb python module is built correctly and is available to Python, run:

> python -c 'import lldb'