layout: documentation title: Compile Bazel from Source

Compile Bazel from source

Ensure that you have OpenJDK 8 installed on your system. For a system based on debian packages (e.g., Debian, Ubuntu), install OpenJDK 8 by running the command sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk.
The standard way of compiling a release version of Bazel from source is to use a distribution archive. Download bazel-<VERSION>-dist.zip from the release page for the desired version. We recommend to also verify the signature made by our release key 48457EE0.
Unzip the archive and call bash ./compile.sh; this will create a bazel binary in output/bazel. This binary is self-contained, so it can be copied to a directory on the PATH (such as /usr/local/bin) or used in-place.

Known issues when compiling from source

On Windows:

version 0.4.4 and below: compile.sh may fail right after start with an error like this:
```
File not found - *.jar
no error prone jar
```
Workaround is to run this (and add it to your ~/.bashrc):
```
export PATH="/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH"
```
version 0.4.3 and below: compile.sh may fail fairly early with many Java compilation errors. The errors look similar to:
```
C:\...\bazel_VR1HFY7x\src\com\google\devtools\build\lib\remote\ExecuteServiceGrpc.java:11: error: package io.grpc.stub does not exist
import static io.grpc.stub.ServerCalls.asyncUnaryCall;
                          ^
```
This is caused by a bug in one of the bootstrap scripts (scripts/bootstrap/compile.sh). Manually apply this one-line fix if you want to build Bazel purely from source (without using an existing Bazel binary): 5402993a5e9065984a42eca2132ec56ca3aa456f.
version 0.3.2 and below: github issue #1919