Current File : //usr/share/doc/nodejs/contributing/building-node-with-ninja.md
# Building Node.js with Ninja
The purpose of this guide is to show how to build Node.js using [Ninja][], as
doing so can be significantly quicker than using `make`. Please see
[Ninja's site][Ninja] for installation instructions (Unix only).
[Ninja][] is supported in the Makefile. Run `./configure --ninja` to configure
the project to run the regular `make` commands with Ninja.
For example, `make` will execute `ninja -C out/Release` internally
to produce a compiled release binary, It will also execute
`ln -fs out/Release/node node`, so that you can execute `./node` at
the project's root.
When running `make`, you will see output similar to the following
if the build has succeeded:
```console
ninja: Entering directory `out/Release`
[4/4] LINK node, POSTBUILDS
```
The bottom line will change while building, showing the progress as
`[finished/total]` build steps. This is useful output that `make` does not
produce and is one of the benefits of using Ninja. Also, Ninja will likely
compile much faster than even `make -j4` (or
`-j<number of processor threads on your machine>`). You can still pass the
number of processes to run for [Ninja][] using the environment variable `JOBS`.
This will be the equivalent to the `-j` parameter in the regular `make`:
```bash
JOBS=12 make
```
## Producing a debug build
To create a debug build rather than a release build:
```bash
./configure --ninja --debug && make
```
[Ninja]: https://ninja-build.org/
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