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Developer's Guide

References

Catalog of Dependencies

The following is a list of dependencies, in no particular order. This guide includes instructions for obtaining many of these at the relevant step(s). You may not need all of these, depending on which portions you are building or developing.

At minimum you will need all of the following

Optional for Development

Necessary unless a download zip snapshot of the ghidra repository is used

  • Git - We use the official installer on Windows. For windows you can also use the github CLI or git from with (Windows Subsystem for Linux - WSL). Most Linux distros have git in their repos. Xcode provides git on macOS. You can skip Git if you download a .zip file of the ghidra repository.

Optional unless following Manual download instructions

  • Bash - This is moot on Linux and macOS. On Windows, we use MinGW. This may be distributed with Git for Windows. This can be skipped if using the automatic build.

Necessary for the development and building of Ghidra, these and more will be downloaded during the Automatic or the Manual instructions

There are many, many others automatically downloaded by Gradle from Maven Central and Bintray JCenter when building and/or setting up the development environment. If you need these offline, a reasonable course of action is to set up a development environment online, perhaps perform a build, and then scrape Gradle's cache.

Install Development and Build Tools

If you're on Windows, install Git unless you will download a .zip clone of the ghidra repository. If you go the manual route many of the commands given below must be executed in Bash (Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), or Use git-bash or MSYS from MinGW).

Install OpenJDK 11 and make sure it's the default java.

Install Eclipse. You can launch Eclipse with any JRE/JDK, but you'll need to ensure Eclipse knows about your JDK 11 installation. In Eclipse, select Window -> Preferences (Eclipse -> Preferences on macOS), then navigate to Java -> Installed JREs, and ensure a JDK 11 is configured.

Install Gradle, add it to your PATH, and ensure it is launched using JDK 11.

Setup Source Repository

You may choose any directory for your working copy, however these instructions will assume you have cloned the source to ~/git/ghidra. Be sure to adjust the commands to match your chosen working directory if different than suggested:

mkdir ~/git
cd ~/git
git clone [email protected]:NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra.git

or unzip a snapshot .zip of the ghidra repository

Setup Build Dependency Repository

Ghidra's build uses artifacts named as available in Maven Central and Bintray JCenter, when possible. Unfortunately, in some cases, the artifact or the particular version we desire is not available. So, in addition to mavenCentral and jcenter, you must configure a flat directory-style repository for manually-downloaded dependencies.

The flat directory-style repository can be created and populated automatically by a provided script, or manually by downloading the required dependencies. Choose one of the two following methods:

Automatic Script Instructions

The flat directory-style repository can be setup automatically by running a simple Gradle script. Navigate to ~/git/ghidra and run the following:

gradle -I gradle/support/fetchDependencies.gradle init

The Gradle task to be executed, in this case init, is unimportant. The point is to have Gradle execute the fetchDependencies.gradle script. If it ran correctly you will have a new ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/ directory populated with the following files:

  • flatRepo/AXMLPrinter2.jar
  • flatRepo/dex-ir-2.0.jar
  • flatRepo/dex-reader-2.0.jar
  • flatRepo/dex-reader-api-2.0.jar
  • flatRepo/dex-tools-2.0.jar
  • flatRepo/dex-translator-2.0.jar
  • flatRepo/dex-writer-2.0.jar
  • GhidraDev/cdt-8.6.0.zip
  • GhidraDev/PyDev 6.3.1.zip
  • GhidraServer/yajsw-stable-12.12.zip
  • fidb/*.fidb

If you see these, congrats! Skip to building or developing. If not, continue with manual download instructions below...

Manual Download Instructions

Create the ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/ directory and required subdirectories to hold the manually-downloaded dependencies:

mkdir ~/git/ghidra/dependencies
mkdir ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/flatRepo
mkdir ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/fidb
mkdir ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/GhidraServer
mkdir ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/GhidraDev

Get Dependencies for FileFormats:

Download dex-tools-2.0.zip from the dex2jar project's releases page on GitHub. Unpack the dex-*.jar files from the lib directory to ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/flatRepo:

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -OL https://github.com/pxb1988/dex2jar/releases/download/2.0/dex-tools-2.0.zip
unzip dex-tools-2.0.zip
cp dex2jar-2.0/lib/dex-*.jar ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/flatRepo/

Download AXMLPrinter2.jar from the "android4me" archive on code.google.com. Place it in ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/flatRepo:

cd ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/flatRepo
curl -OL https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/android4me/AXMLPrinter2.jar

Get Dependencies for GhidraServer

Building the GhidraServer requires "Yet another Java service wrapper" (yajsw) version 12.12. Download yajsw-stable-12.12.zip from their project on www.sourceforge.net, and place it in: ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/GhidraServer/:

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -OL https://sourceforge.net/projects/yajsw/files/yajsw/yajsw-stable-12.12/yajsw-stable-12.12.zip
cp ~/Downloads/yajsw-stable-12.12.zip ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/GhidraServer/

Get Dependencies for GhidraDev

Building the GhidraDev plugin for Eclipse requires the CDT and PyDev plugins for Eclipse. Download cdt-8.6.0.zip from The Eclipse Foundation, and place it in: ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/GhidraDev/:

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -OL 'https://archive.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/8.6/cdt-8.6.0.zip'
curl -o 'cdt-8.6.0.zip.sha512' -L --retry 3 'https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/sums.php?type=sha512&file=/tools/cdt/releases/8.6/cdt-8.6.0.zip'
shasum -a 512 -c 'cdt-8.6.0.zip.sha512'
cp ~/Downloads/cdt-8.6.0.zip ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/GhidraDev/

Download PyDev 6.3.1.zip from www.pydev.org, and place it in the same directory:

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -L -o 'PyDev 6.3.1.zip' https://sourceforge.net/projects/pydev/files/pydev/PyDev%206.3.1/PyDev%206.3.1.zip
cp ~/Downloads/'PyDev 6.3.1.zip' ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/GhidraDev/

Get Ghidra Function ID datasets

Download the Ghidra Function ID dataset files from the ghidra-data GitHub repository and place them in ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/fidb:

cd ~/Downloads   # Or wherever
curl -L -o 'vs2012_x64.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vs2012_x64.fidb
curl -L -o 'vs2012_x86.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vs2012_x86.fidb
curl -L -o 'vs2015_x64.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vs2015_x64.fidb
curl -L -o 'vs2015_x86.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vs2015_x86.fidb
curl -L -o 'vs2017_x64.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vs2017_x64.fidb
curl -L -o 'vs2017_x86.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vs2017_x86.fidb
curl -L -o 'vs2019_x64.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vs2019_x64.fidb
curl -L -o 'vs2019_x86.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vs2019_x86.fidb
curl -L -o 'vsOlder_x64.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vsOlder_x64.fidb
curl -L -o 'vsOlder_x86.fidb' https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/raw/master/FunctionID/vsOlder_x86.fidb
cp ~/Downloads/*.fidb ~/git/ghidra/dependencies/fidb/

Building Ghidra

Before building, you may want to update the version and release name. These properties are kept in ~/git/ghidra/Ghidra/application.properties.

To build the full package, use Gradle:

gradle buildGhidra

The output will be placed in ~/git/ghidra/build/dist/. It will be named according to the version, release name, build date, and platform. To test it, unzip it where you like, and execute ./ghidraRun.

NOTE: Unless pre-built manually, the Eclipse GhidraDev plugin will not be included in the build. In addition, some other supporting data will also be missing. See the sections below for instructions on how to produce these components. You may also be able to copy some of these already-built components from a previous official distribution.

Developing Ghidra

Prepare the Environment

From the project root, execute:

gradle prepDev

The prepDev tasks primarily include generating some source, indexing our built-in help, and unpacking some dependencies.

Import Eclipse Projects

To develop/modify Ghidra, you must first use Gradle to generate Eclipse projects. From the project root:

gradle eclipse

Select File -> Import, expand General, and select "Existing Projects into Workspace." Select the root of the source repo, and select "Search for nested projects." Select all, and Finish. You may see build path errors until the environment is properly prepared, as described below.

Building the natives

Some of Ghidra's components are built for the native platform. We currently support Linux, macOS, and Windows 64-bit x86 systems. Others should be possible, but we do not test on them.

Now build using Gradle:

On Linux:

gradle buildNatives_linux64

On macOS:

gradle buildNatives_osx64

On Windows:

gradle buildNatives_win64

This will build the decompiler, the demangler for GNU toolchains, the sleigh compiler, and (on Windows only) the PDB parser.

Pre-compile Language Modules (optional)

Optionally, to pre-compile all the language modules, you may also execute:

gradle sleighCompile

If the language modules are not pre-compiled, Ghidra will compile them at run time on an as-needed basis.

Import and Build GhidraDev project (optional)

Developing the GhidraDev Eclipse plugin requires the Eclipse PDE (Plug-in Development Environment), which can be installed via the Eclipse marketplace. It is also included in the Eclipse IDE for RCP and RAP Developers. To generate the GhidraDev Eclipse projects, execute:

gradle eclipse -PeclipsePDE

Import the newly generated GhidraDev projects into Eclipse.

Note: If you are getting compilation errors related to PyDev and CDT, go into Eclipse's preferences, and under Target Platform, activate /Eclipse GhidraDevPlugin/GhidraDev.target.

See ~/git/ghidra/GhidraBuild/EclipsePlugins/GhidraDev/GhidraDevPlugin/build_README.txt for instructions on how to build the GhidraDev plugin.

Run and Debug Ghidra from Eclipse

To run or debug Ghidra from Eclipse, use the provided launch configuration (usually under the "Run" or "Debug" buttons). If the launcher does not appear, it probably has not been marked as a favorite. Click the dropdown next to the "Run" button and select "Run Configurations." Then expand "Java Application" on the left to find the "Ghidra" launcher.

Running tests

For running unit tests, run

gradle unitTestReport

for more complex integration tests run

gradle integrationTest

For running both unit test and integration test and generate report use

gradle combinedTestReport

Setup build in CI

For running build in headless mode on Linux, in CI environment, or in Docker, before running tests, run

Xvfb :99 -nolisten tcp &
export DISPLAY=:99

this is required to make AWT happy.

Building Supporting Data

Some features of Ghidra require the curation of rather extensive databases. These include the Data Type Archives and Function ID Databases, both of which require collecting header files and libraries for the relevant SDKs and platforms. Much of this work is done by hand. The archives included in our official builds can be found in the ghidra-data repository.

Building Data Type Archives

This task is often done manually from the Ghidra GUI, and the archives included in our official build require a fair bit of fine tuning. From a CodeBrowser window, select File -> Parse C Source. From here you can create and configure parsing profiles, which lists headers and pre-processor options. Then, click Parse to File to create the Data Type Archive. The result can be added to an installation or source tree by copying it to ~/git/ghidra/Ghidra/Features/Base/data/typeinfo.

Building FID Databases

This task is often done manually from the Ghidra GUI, and the archives included in our official build require a fair bit of fine tuning. You will first need to import the relevant libraries from which you'd like to produce a FID database. This is often a set of libraries from an SDK. We include a variety of Visual Studio platforms in the official build. The official .fidb files can be found in the ghidra-data repository here https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra-data/tree/master/FunctionID

From a CodeBrowser window, select File -> Configure. Enable the "Function ID" plugins, and close the dialog. Now, from the CodeBrowser window, select Tools -> Function ID -> Create new empty FidDb. Choose a destination file. Now, select Tools -> Function ID -> Populate FidDb from programs. Fill out the options appropriately and click OK.

If you'd like some details of our fine tuning, take a look at ~/git/ghidra/Ghidra/Features/FunctionID/data/building_fid.txt.

Hacking on the Debugger

The Debugger consists of multiple modules comprising its own collection of utilities, frameworks, and features. There is plenty of new ground to be broken. Before getting too deep into it, please see our dedicated Debugger Developer's Guide.