Build from source

This page details how to build TinyGo from source. If you would like to install a pre-built binary release, please see our quick install guide.

You’ll need Go installed on your machine to build TinyGo. The Go team provides install documentation here.

A major dependency of TinyGo is LLVM. You can either use a version of LLVM already on your system or build LLVM manually. Building manually takes a long time (around an hour depending on how fast your system is) so it is recommended to use a version of LLVM already on your system if that’s possible. The links provided below show how to install LLVM one way or the other.

After finishing building TinyGo from source remember to refer to the additional requirements page to ensure you have a fully working TinyGo installation.

Uninstalling TinyGo before build

It’s highly suggested you uninstall TinyGo if it is present on your computer before proceeding.

If you installed TinyGo via a package manager the command will depend on your operating system.

Linux Debian and Ubuntu users may run the following command to uninstall TinyGo:

sudo apt remove tinygo

Linux Fedora users may uninstall TinyGo with:

sudo dnf remove tinygo

MacOS users may uninstall TinyGo with the following command:

brew uninstall tinygo

Windows users who installed with Scoop may run the following command to uninstall TinyGo:

scoop uninstall tinygo

Any OS with a manually installed TinyGo: Remove the cloned repository. This will remove LLVM along with the TinyGo root.

You should also check if there’s a remaining tinygo executable in your path and remove it too.

Linux and MacOS may run echo $(which tinygo) to print the path to the existing TinyGo executable.

Windows users may run where tinygo to see the where any remaining TinyGo executable is located at.

Repository cloning (before build)

Start with getting the source code. On Windows, you might want to install the build dependencies first.

git clone https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo.git
cd tinygo

Once cloned, you can can choose which branch to build. The default branch is the latest release, but you can also build the latest development version:

# If building released version this command is not necessary.
git checkout dev

Once the branch is selected, pull submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Now you are ready to build TinyGo- but you must choose whether to build with a manual LLVM install or with a system installed LLVM. After building you should also read additional requirements to make sure you’ve fulfilled all the requirements for the features of TinyGo you’ll be using.