Building¶
Note
If you just want to use the latest Release version of Cutter, please note that we provide pre-compiled binaries for Windows, Linux, and macOS on our release page.
Getting the Source¶
Make sure you’ve git
installed in your system (Installation guide) and do the following:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/rizinorg/cutter
This will clone the Cutter source and its dependencies(rizin, etc.) under cutter and you should see the following dir structure:
cutter/-|
|-docs/ # Cutter Documentation
|-rizin/ # Rizin submodule
|-src/ # Cutter Source Code
Following sections assume that cutter is your working dir. (if not, do cd cutter
)
Building on Linux¶
Requirements¶
On Linux, you will need:
build-essential
cmake
meson
libzip-dev
libzlib-dev
qt5
qt5-svg
pkgconf
curl*
python-setuptools*
KSyntaxHighlighter**
graphviz**
* Recommended while building with
make
/Cmake
.** Optional. If present, these add extra features to Cutter. See CMake Building Options.
On Debian-based Linux distributions, all of these essential packages can be installed with this single command:
sudo apt install build-essential cmake meson libzip-dev zlib1g-dev qt5-default libqt5svg5-dev qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools
Note
For Ubuntu 18.04 and lower, meson
should be installed with pip install --upgrade --user meson
.
On Arch-based Linux distributions:
sudo pacman -Syu --needed base-devel cmake meson qt5-base qt5-svg qt5-tools
Building Steps¶
The recommended way to build Cutter on Linux is by using CMake. Simply invoke CMake to build Cutter and its dependency Rizin.
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCUTTER_USE_BUNDLED_RIZIN=ON ..
cmake --build .
If your operating system has a newer version of CMake (> v3.12) you can use this cleaner solution:
cmake -B build -DCUTTER_USE_BUNDLED_RIZIN=ON
cmake --build build
If you want to use Cutter with another version of Rizin you can omit -DCUTTER_USE_BUNDLED_RIZIN=ON
. Note that using a version of Rizin which isn’t the version Cutter is using can cause issues and the compilation might fail.
Note
If you are interested in building Cutter with support for Python plugins, Syntax Highlighting, Crash Reporting and more, please look at the full list of CMake Building Options.
After the build process is complete, you should have the Cutter
executable in the build dir.
You can now execute Cutter like this:
./build/Cutter
Building on Windows¶
Requirements¶
Cutter works on Windows 7 or newer. To compile Cutter it is necessary to have the following installed:
A version of Visual Studio (2015, 2017 and 2019 are supported)
CMake
Qt
Recommended Way¶
To build Cutter on Windows machines using CMake,
you will have to make sure that the executables are available
in your %PATH%
environment variable.
Note that the paths below may vary depending on your version of Qt and Visual Studio.
set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=c:\Qt\qt-5.6.2-msvc2013-x86\5.6\msvc2013\lib\cmake
mkdir build
cd build
cmake-gui ..
Click Configure
and select your version of Visual Studio from the list,
for example Visual Studio 14 2015
.
After the configuration is done, click Generate
and you can open
Cutter.sln
to compile the code as usual.
Building with Meson¶
There is another way to compile Cutter on Windows if the one above does not work or does not suit your needs.
Additional requirements:
Ninja build system
Meson build system
Download and unpack Ninja to the Cutter source root directory (ie. cutter - working dir).
Note that in the below steps, the paths may vary depending on your version of Qt and Visual Studio.
Environment settings (example for x64 version):
:: Export MSVC variables
CALL "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat" x64
:: Add qmake to PATH
SET "PATH=C:\Qt\5.10.1\msvc2015_64\bin;%PATH%"
:: Add Python to PATH
SET "PATH=C:\Program Files\Python36;%PATH%"
Install Meson:
python -m pip install meson
To compile Cutter, run:
CALL prepare_rizin.bat
CALL build.bat
Building with Qmake¶
Using QtCreator¶
One standard way is to simply load the project inside QtCreator.
To do so, open QtCreator and on the welcome screen click on “Open Project”,
and finally select the cutter/src/Cutter.pro
file.
QtCreator will then allow you to directly edit the source code and build the project.
Note
On Windows, for the .pro
file to be compiled successfully, it is required
to run prepare_rizin.bat
beforehand.
Compiling on Linux / macOS¶
The easiest way, but not the one we recommend, is to simply run ./build.sh
from the root directory,
and let the magic happen. The script will use qmake
to build Cutter.
The build.sh
script is meant to be deprecated and will be deleted in the future.
If you want to manually use qmake, follow these steps:
mkdir build; cd build
qmake ../src/Cutter.pro
make
cd ..
Additional Steps for macOS¶
On macOS you will also have to copy the launcher bash script:
mv Cutter.app/Contents/MacOS/Cutter Cutter.app/Contents/MacOS/Cutter.bin
cp ../src/macos/Cutter Cutter.app/Contents/MacOS/Cutter && chmod +x Cutter.app/Contents/MacOS/Cutter
CMake Building Options¶
Note that there are some major building options available:
CUTTER_USE_BUNDLED_RIZIN
automatically compile Rizin from submodule.CUTTER_ENABLE_PYTHON
compile with Python support.CUTTER_ENABLE_PYTHON_BINDINGS
automatically generate Python Bindings with Shiboken2, required for Python plugins!CUTTER_ENABLE_KSYNTAXHIGHLIGHTING
use KSyntaxHighlighting for code highlighting.CUTTER_ENABLE_GRAPHVIZ
enable Graphviz for graph layouts.CUTTER_EXTRA_PLUGIN_DIRS
List of addition plugin locations. Useful when preparing package for Linux distros that have strict package layout rules.
Cutter binary release options, not needed for most users and might not work easily outside CI environment:
CUTTER_ENABLE_CRASH_REPORTS
is used to compile Cutter with crash handling system enabled (Breakpad).CUTTER_ENABLE_DEPENDENCY_DOWNLOADS
Enable downloading of dependencies. Setting to OFF doesn’t affect any downloads done by Rizin build. This option is used for preparing Cutter binary release packges. Turned off by default.CUTTER_PACKAGE_DEPENDENCIES
During install step include the third party dependencies. This option is used for preparing Cutter binary release packges.
These options can be enabled or disabled from the command line arguments passed to CMake. For example, to build Cutter with support for Python plugins, you can run this command:
cmake -B build -DCUTTER_ENABLE_PYTHON=ON -DCUTTER_ENABLE_PYTHON_BINDINGS=ON
Or if one wants to explicitly disable an option:
cmake -B build -DCUTTER_ENABLE_PYTHON=OFF
Compiling Cutter with Breakpad Support¶
If you want to build Cutter with crash handling system, you will want to first prepare Breakpad. For this, simply run one of the scripts (according to your OS) from root Cutter directory:
source scripts/prepare_breakpad_linux.sh # Linux
source scripts/prepare_breakpad_macos.sh # MacOS
scripts/prepare_breakpad.bat # Windows
Then if you are building on Linux you want to change PKG_CONFIG_PATH
environment variable
so it contains $CUSTOM_BREAKPAD_PREFIX/lib/pkgconfig
. For this simply run
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$CUSTOM_BREAKPAD_PREFIX/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
Troubleshooting¶
Cmake can’t find Qt
Cmake: qt development package not found
Depending on how Qt installed (Distribution packages or using the Qt
installer application), CMake may not be able to find it by itself if it
is not in a common place. If that is the case, double-check that the
correct Qt version is installed. Locate its prefix (a directory
containing bin/, lib/, include/, etc.) and specify it to CMake using
CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH
in the above process, e.g.:
rm CMakeCache.txt # the cache may be polluted with unwanted libraries found before
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/opt/Qt/5.9.1/gcc_64 ..
Rizin’s librz_*.so cannot be found when running Cutter
./Cutter: error while loading shared libraries: librz_lang.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
The exact Rizin .so file that cannot be found may vary. On some systems, the linker by default uses RUNPATH instead of RPATH which is incompatible with the way Rizin is currently compiled. It results in some of the Rizin libraries not being found when running cutter. You can verify if this is the problem by running ldd ./Cutter. If all the Rizin libraries are missing you have a different problem. The workaround is to either add the –disable-new-dtags linker flag when compiling Cutter or add the Rizin installation path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.
cmake -DCMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS="-Wl,--disable-new-dtags" ..
r_*.h: No such file or directory
rz_util/rz_annotated_code.h: No such file or directory
If you face an error where some header file starting with rz_
is missing, you should check the rizin submodule and
make sure it is in sync with upstream Cutter repo. Simply run:
git submodule update --init --recursive
rz_core development package not found
If you installed Rizin and still encounter this error, it could be that your
PATH
environment variable is set improperly (doesn’t contain
/usr/local/bin
). You can fix this by adding the Rizin installation dir to
your PATH
variable.
macOS specific solutions:
On macOS, that can also be, for example, due to Qt Creator.app
being copied over to /Applications
. To fix this, append
:/usr/local/bin
to the PATH
variable within the Build
Environment section in Qt Creator. See the screenshot below should you
encounter any problems.
You can also try:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/bin/prefix/rizin/lib/pkgconfig qmake
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/cutter/rizin/pkgcfg qmake
(for a newer version and if the rizin submodule is being built and used)

You can also install Rizin into /usr/lib/pkgconfig/
and then
add a variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH
with the value /usr/lib/pkgconfig/
.
macOS libjpeg error
On macOS, Qt5 apps fail to build on QtCreator if you have the libjpeg
installed with brew. Run this command to work around the issue:
sudo mv /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.dylib /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.dylib.not-found
LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810
On macOS High Sierra Cutter crashes due to the absence of gettext
library. To fix this problem, simply install the missing package:
brew install gettext