Build Options

Run zig build --help in the root of ZLS source directory to print usage information.

Here are some of the common build options:

• -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe
• -Dtarget
• -Dcpu=baseline (opposite of -march=native)
• --prefix

Resolve version string

When compiling a tagged release of ZLS, the version is hard coded. No further action is needed.

For development builds, the version string is determined by running git -C . describe --match "*.*.*" --tags and formatting the output as MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-dev.COMMIT_HEIGHT+SHORT_COMMIT_HASH (e.g. 0.14.0-dev.365+6a16b27). If the version cannot be resolved, it defaults to MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-dev (e.g. 0.14.0-dev). This logic is implemented in the getVersion function within build.zig.

If building ZLS without access to Git metadata (e.g., from a shallow clone or tarball), it is recommended to manually specify the version string using the -Dversion-string build option.

Dependency fetching

ZLS uses the Zig’s builtin package manager to fetch dependencies and compile them from source. By default, Zig stores dependencies in the global cache directory at $(zig env | jq -r .global_cache_dir)/p, where each dependency is uniquely identified by a hash of its content.

The content after building ZLS may look similar to this:

$ tree $(zig env | jq -r .global_cache_dir)/p
/home/me/.cache/zig/p
├── 1220102cb2c669d82184fb1dc5380193d37d68b54e8d75b76b2d155b9af7d7e2e76d
│   ├── build.zig
│   ├── DiffMatchPatch.zig
│   └── ...
├── 12205f5e7505c96573f6fc5144592ec38942fb0a326d692f9cddc0c7dd38f9028f29
│   ├── build.zig
│   ├── build.zig.zon
│   ├── known-folders.zig
│   └── ...
└── 12208e12a10e78de19f140acae65e6edc20189459dd208d5f6b7afdf0aa894113d1b
    ├── build.zig
    ├── build.zig.zon
    ├── src
    └── ...

If you need to fetch dependencies in a separate phase (e.g. during the configure phase), use --system [pkgdir] to disable automatic package fetching and manually specify the directory containing the fetched dependencies. Dependency hashes and URLs can be found in the build.zig.zon file.